RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

Lowell Politics: April 5, 2026

On Tuesday, March 31, 2026, the Lowell City Council authorized the city manager to execute a land disposition agreement that would transfer a large parcel in the Hamilton Canal Innovation District (HCID) to Wexford Development to construct a 75,000 square foot research and development facility that will be used by Draper, one of UMass Lowell’s primary partners in the Lowell Innovation Network Corridor (LINC) project. The parcel being conveyed is Lot 15 on the HCID subdivision plan, but most would recognize it as the former surface parking lot of the National Park Visitor Center. Located between Dutton Street, the Merrimack Canal, and the trolley tracks to the west, and the HCID parking garage to the east, this is the most important undeveloped parcel remaining in the HCID.

The purchase price to be paid by Wexford to the city is $1.5 million with the closing to occur this October. Construction is to begin the following month with the building substantially completed in mid-2028 and the facility fully operational later that year.

Headquartered in Kendall Square in Cambridge – in what has been called the most innovative square mile in the entire United States – Draper was founded in the 1930s by Charles Stark Draper at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to develop aviation and military navigation and guidance systems for aircraft, submarines, rockets and the Apollo space craft. Now organized as a nonprofit R&D company, Draper remains a leader in the most advanced technologies used by the military and in related fields.

Given their business and the world today, it’s safe to say that Draper is in a growth phase. In fact, the company representative who spoke at the council meeting said demand for Draper products is explosive and the company is desperate to find new employees. One of the primary attractions for Draper, I believe, is the existing educational system here, from pre-K through post graduate degrees, a system that can be a pipeline for the company’s employment needs. This creates a great opportunity for the young people of Lowell to obtain highly valued jobs right here in the city.

The original vision of the Hamilton Canal District that was conceived a quarter century ago emphasized mixed use development. If all development in the district was commercial, the place would be deserted on nights and weekends when the businesses were closed. On the other hand, if it was entirely residential, everyone would leave in the morning to go elsewhere for work and return at night, making the place deserted during the day. By mixing the two uses, the place can always be vibrant and support ancillary amenities like restaurants and retail stores that add to the quality of life of the neighborhood and support small businesses ownership which is foundational to the city’s economy.

Despite the lofty ambitions of planners, except for the Lowell Justice Center and the two parking garages, all projects in the district thus far have been residential, which makes this use even more significant.

However, because so much residential use has been created in this vicinity, councilors questioned the developers about ways this project, which also includes a manufacturing component, might adversely affect the quality of life of residential neighbors. Councilors specifically asked about the number of heavy trucks making deliveries and the volume of noise emitted by the manufacturing process. Neither should be cause for concern, assured Draper representatives. Other than the usual stream of FedEx trucks, the number of tractor trailers arriving at the place will be only a few a month. (After all, they are making tiny computer components, not heavy machinery.) As for noise from the manufacturing process, at a similar facility in Cambridge, when one stands on the sidewalk immediately outside the building, no noise from inside can be heard, and even inside the building, any machine sounds are barely audible.

With their questions answered, councilors voted unanimously for the project to proceed.

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Two motions dealt with the admission process at Greater Lowell Technical High School, something not within the official purview of the council, but something of concern to some constituents. Councilor Sean McDonough requested the city council “send a letter to our state delegation, the state Secretary of Education, the commissioner of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), and the governor, expressing our strong opposition to the mandated change to lottery admissions for our vocational and technical high schools.” The second motion, by Councilor John Descoteaux, requested the city manager “forward a letter to DESE and the governor’s office asking to reconsider the Greater Lowell Technical High School’s new lottery policy.”

After considerable discussion, the combined motions passed by a 9 to 1 vote with Mayor Erik Gitschier abstaining since he is employed at the vocational school. Councilor Belinda Juran was the lone vote in opposition.

Unless you’re the parent of a child who wants to attend a vocational high school, or someone employed at a vocational high school, you probably haven’t followed this issue very closely. To give a sense of how it arose, here is a sample of Boston Globe coverage of the issue:

March 28, 2021 – “Fighting for fairness in vocational tech school admissions” – In this editorial, the paper argued that the state should require a lottery system, citing a just-released study by DESE that identified “opportunity gaps” in the admission process. Specifically, the existing admissions process, although it varied by school district, mostly relied on middle school grades, attendance, disciplinary history, and recommendations. The DESE report found that this system resulted in disproportionately low admission rates for students of color and for economically disadvantaged students.

April 20, 2021 – “Under pressure, state education officials pass preliminary admissions changes for vocational schools” – In the face of complaints (and data) that the current vocational school admission process was “unfair to students of color, low-income students, English learners, and students with disabilities, depriving them of an important career pathway” the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education voted unanimously to change the vocational school admission process to give “disadvantaged students a better chance of attending.”

(In case you think this is a partisan issue, recall that when this all started, Republican Charlie Baker was governor. He was succeeded by Democrat Maura Healey in January 2023.)

February 5, 2024 – “Vocational-technical school admissions should be based on lottery” – This Op-Ed points out that up until 2003, vocational schools used a lottery for admission, but in that year, the MCAS exam became a high school graduation requirement and the state’s vocational schools persuaded the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to permit vocational schools to select students using grades, attendance records, discipline records, recommendations and interviews. The writers observe, “This dramatic admissions policy change enabled voc-tech schools to select the highest performing applicants into their schools. Is it any wonder that, by self-selecting their student body, voc-tech schools suddenly became high performing on MCAS tests and other measures?”

May 2, 2025 – “Mass. House moved to block vocational school lottery admissions” – At the urging of vocational school administrators and others wishing to maintain the status quo, a group of state representatives moved (unsuccessfully) to prohibit the Department of Education from making any admission changes before the 2027-28 admission year. Advocates for the current system questioned the accuracy of studies showing admission disparities and contended that the answer is to create more seats in vocational schools. (No one opposes that but it’s not feasible given the cost of doing it.) Proponents of a changed admission system, including Governor Healey, respond that the proposed changes do allow attendance and discipline to be used as weights in an admission lottery while retaining a lottery as the primary means of selection.

May 20, 2025 – “Mass. Education board approves vocational school lottery admissions, temporary graduation requirements” – The new rule prohibited vocational schools from ranking applicants based on “selective criteria like grades, recommendation from guidance counselors, and personal interviews” but does allow schools to use evidence of interest and a lack of severe discipline violations as weights in an admission lottery while also using middle school attendance and “student awareness” (i.e., attending a tour of the vocational school) as a pre-condition for entering the lottery.

According to the Greater Lowell Technical High School website, the admission lottery for the class entering the school this September was held on March 20, 2026. Presumably, people unhappy with the outcome of the lottery complained to city councilors, hence the timing of these two motions.

In voting against the motions, Councilor Juran said that this year, 848 middle school students from Lowell had applied for 428 Lowell-allocated seats, which meant roughly half got in. Councilor Juran continued:

“So no matter what, somebody was going to be disappointed. And if their option is Lowell High School, to me, that’s a great option. And we should not treat it like a second-tier school. Every few days I learn about teachers who are doing amazing work there. We have the teacher of the year in Massachusetts at that school. And it’s the kind of high school I went to, a diverse, large, you know, inner city school. It offers a variety of programs. It’s within walking distance of most of, or many of our students’ homes and it has classes ranging from remedial all the way through AP and early college.”

“I appreciate that no family wants to be disappointed from their first choice, but demand here is higher than supply, so somebody will be disappointed. And the issue here is one of policy: should we as the city council put our thumb on the scale to change the result for a few students to go to this school while others who did get in are not complaining to us?”

“We know the students whose parents have reached out who have said, ‘I wish my student had gotten in’ but the students who now were fortunate enough to get in are not complaining. So I think, sort of saying, that we are trying to change a policy when it’s really the reaction of some families, I think, is something we have to take seriously and I’m not sure this is what we should be doing.”

Ted Leonsis owns the NHL’s Washington Capitals, the NBA’s Washington Wizards, and the WNBA’s Washington Mystics. He made his fortune as a senior executive at America Online (AOL) back in the 1990s. He’s also a graduate of Lowell High School, class of 1973.

In his remarks at his induction ceremony as a Lowell High Distinguished Alumni in 2005, Leonsis recalled that he was not a great student. In fact, when he told his guidance counselor he wanted to go to college, the counselor disabused him of that aspiration, saying he should consider a job at a grocery store instead.

However, in the summers during high school, Leonsis earned money by mowing neighborhood lawns. One of his customers was also one of his high school teachers, a teacher who apparently recognized the young man’s potential because this teacher guided Leonsis through admission to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Leonsis thrived there and, as they say, the rest is history.

No one in Ted Leonsis’ family or in the official school hierarchy was advocating for him. Instead, he won the lottery in the form of a perceptive teacher who helped.

There are many ways to learn. Some students who don’t do well in middle school would perhaps thrive in a more hands-on, vocational education setting as is offered by Greater Lowell Tech. But if admission to that school is governed by their grades, attendance and behavior in middle school, they would never get in and that opportunity would be foreclosed. This new lottery system injects randomness into the equation and consequently makes it more equitable.

That’s the “glass is half full” take on this issue. In contrast, a “glass is half empty” view would say that public schools are supposed to take everyone, not just those who have good grades, good attendance and good behavior. Certainly, those who run the Vocational School would like it that way and, if it were a private school, that would be their prerogative. But they are a public school which means they have a responsibility to educate all. Every student with poor attendance or poor discipline that was excluded from the Vocational School under the prior admission policy ended up at Lowell High School. Students with those types of issues demand a disproportionate share of a school’s resources, so when Lowell High takes in more than its share of challenging students – which it must since it is a public school – it dilutes the resources available for most other students in the school, and everyone at LHS pays a price for another public school’s exclusionary admittance practices.

But that’s all theory. The vote Tuesday night was about politics. A Venn Diagram of this issue would find the circle of people upset with vocational school admissions completely within the slightly larger circle of people who vote in city elections, hence the lopsided outcome of the vote.

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My newsletter of two weeks ago featured an essay about Lowell in World War II. At the end of it, I mentioned that I am now researching the 440 names of servicemembers from Lowell who died during World War II, a project I hope to complete by this Memorial Day.

One thing about this research that has struck me is the staggering number who were killed as infantrymen in the push across Europe from D-Day in June 1944 to the surrender of Germany in May 1945.

Last week, I reviewed a book that covers this period. Tubby: Raymond O. Barton and the US Army, 1889-1963 is a biography of the general who commanded the 4th Infantry Division through most of that stretch of combat. With at least six of the Lowell’s war dead having been members of that division, the book provided valuable context in understanding their experiences. If you’re interested in the history of World War II, please check out my review.

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In this week’s Seen & Heard column, I wrote about the obituary of Shigeaki Mori, a Hiroshima survivor who helped highlight the story of Lowell’s Normand Brissette, a POW who was killed by the atomic bomb; I reviewed the movie A Complete Unknown, which is a Bob Dylan biopic; and I reviewed two books, Book and Dagger which explains how professors and archivists helped create a functioning intelligence agency for the US during WWII, and A Short Stay in Hell, a thought provoking fantasy novella about the hereafter.

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Save the Date: This spring’s walking tours of historic Lowell Cemetery will be held on Saturday, May 2, and Sunday, May 3, both at 10 am, both beginning at the Knapp Avenue entrance next to Shedd Park. The same tour will be conducted on both days. Just show up and enjoy.

Poet Maggie Dietz of UMass Lowell: New Book

Poet Maggie Dietz of UMass Lowell

In her weekly Substack newsletter, ‘New England Literary News,’ writer Nina MacLaughlin shares her view of a new collection of poems by Maggie Dietz of the UMass Lowell Dept. of English. Readers can subscribe to New England Literary News here.

Here is the brief review:

In her searing new collection, If You Would Let Me (Four Way), poet Maggie Dietz breathes new heat into the story of Persephone and Demeter. Dietz, who teaches at UMass Lowell and lives in New Hampshire, writes of the tumult of adolescence, the moment when innocence begins its dissolve, secrets on a riverbank, picking hyacinths before the earth cracks. Then it’s hair dye and botched piercings of the face and a pick-up stick laddering of slice marks on the arm. There’s exile and outcastery and wilder violence, too, a smashed mirror, a hurled stone. Dietz captures a mother’s helplessness and the bone-deep need to help: if only the girl would let herself be held, “Your broken eyes would see how much you need me.” It’s the mother’s ungrantable wish, and a bashing fury results. “I let you I gave you I held / You I made you but I couldn’t / Save you.” And what can a mother do? Demeter “let small children starve and cows / with calves I am not proud but what choice did I have / like corn and barley they were mine to kill.” Remember: Demeter’s rage came from the simple question, where did my daughter go? Dietz reminds us, “It isn’t safe to love.”

Book Review: Tubby: Raymond O. Barton and the US Army

Book Review: Tubby: Raymond O. Barton and the US Army

Book by Stephen A. Bourque

Review by Richard Howe

This is a masterful biography of the U.S. Army general who, among other things, commanded the 4th  Infantry Division from D-Day through the Battle of the Bulge. Anyone interested in the pre-World War II U.S. Army and the fight across Northern Europe in 1944 will find this fascinating reading. Barton was a prolific letter writer and his aides kept a meticulous “war diary” throughout his command. Bourque uses both extensively to enrich the text with granular details. 

Barton grew up in the American Southwest in a politically-connected family and landed an appointment to West Point in the Class of 1912. Short and stocky but never obese, Barton’s leadership of the West Point wrestling team earned him the affectionate nickname “Tubby” which stuck with him his entire life. (At least in Barton’s case, “Tubby” had a different connotation then than it does now.)

His early assignments demonstrated a strong aptitude for training troops. When the U.S. entered World War I, Army leadership deemed Barton more valuable as a trainer of the rapidly growing Army than as a combat troop leader so he did not make it to Europe until after the Armistice. 

Between the wars, Barton rotated between field units and academic assignments. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the U.S. Army had 180,000 active duty troops which placed it behind Portugal and ahead of Bulgaria in national army size. How the U.S. Army raced to grow in strength and competency in the next two years is an important and underappreciated story. This book adds much to that account since Barton was a central figure in the massive pre-war military maneuvers that helped prepare U.S. forces to fight Germany and Japan. 

Barton’s skill as a trainer was in full view when he took command of the 4th Infantry Division. Although the unit had not yet been in combat in World War II, when the division landed on Utah Beach on June 6, 1944, it fought like a veteran outfit. 

Tubby then follows Barton and the 4th Division through the breakout from Normandy, the liberation of Paris, the race across France, the deadly and ill-fated fighting in the Hurtgen Forest, and the Battle of the Bulge. By then, a longtime ulcer and the stress of consecutive months of command began to affect Barton’s judgment and performance and, at the urging of longtime friends, he asked to be relieved of his command. Although he expected to come back to a combat command, the war ended before that happened and he soon retired. He and his wife settled in Augusta, Georgia, where he became an active member of the community for the rest of his life. 

This book is particularly valuable in depicting the day-to-day experience of a division commander in the Northern Europe campaign. After the operations order was given, Barton spent almost every waking moment doing in person coordination, traveling to subordinate regiments and battalions, headquarters of neighboring units, and then to corps headquarters. This process was critically important for collecting and sharing information, but also for placing himself at the critical point on the battlefield, wherever that might be. This became even more important as the war went on. The devastating casualties sustained by the 4th Division robbed the unit of the highly trained troops and leaders who landed in Normandy. Their place was taken by replacements thrust into battle with little training and no experience. Still, because enough of the original leadership cadre survived, the 4th Infantry Division continued to perform superbly through the rest of the war. 

Bourque demonstrates how the clubbishness of the small pre-war officer corps had a substantial impact on how the U.S. Army operated once the war had begun. I cannot recall a single instance in which Barton encountered a fellow commander that he had not previously met, whether at West Point, in prior assignments, or at the War College. This familiarity undoubtedly aided coordination, but it also injected favoritism and politics into the command structure not always to the benefit of the units and troops involved. 

Finally, two outsized-characters make important appearances. Notwithstanding being the son of a president and a politician in his own right, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. had an outstanding record as a combat commander in World War I and earlier in World War II. Shortly before the Normandy invasion he was assigned to the 4th Infantry Division as a “spare” brigadier general. With Barton’s grudging consent, Roosevelt landed with the first wave on Utah Beach and provided decisive leadership from that point on. By Bourque’s account, Barton and Roosevelt developed a close and respectful relationship with Roosevelt providing an invaluable assist in the intra-unit coordination described earlier. Despite worsening cardiac problems which he kept to himself, Roosevelt followed a frantic schedule until his death from a heart attack on July 12, 1944, five weeks after the D-Day landing. The other big figure to appear is Ernest Hemingway who was a regular presence at the 4th Division from Paris until Barton’s departure. Hemingway’s day-to-day activities are reported elsewhere, but this book documents the strong friendship that arose between the famous author and General Barton.

On Being a Guest, and Dumpling Evenings

On Being a Guest, and Dumpling Evenings

by Leo Racicot

I was in her company only once, twice if you count the time she came over to Ed’s. That visit was brief; we talked about The Makioka Sisters, the occasional merits of Bizet over Mozart, the high price of flowers at the corner market. There was not time to like her or not like her: she was “sweet”.

Ed is Edmund White, literary lion and gay cultural and social icon. He and Marilyn have lived in each others’ pockets for sixty-one years. Their affection for each other was as sturdy and tantalizing as a slice of good pie.

One October evening, Ed brought me over to Marilyn’s home on the Upper West Side. I was his “date” and this was to be my introduction to Marilyn’s “dumpling evenings”, calm, unpretentious gatherings of the great, the near-great, the soon-to-be great, the never-will-be-great. Quiet, intimate dinner parties, a tradition begun back when both were kids.

I have never forgotten that evening, and I know I never shall, held at Elizabeth Bishop’s “sun and crumb” time, that hour between day and night that summons us to table and to each other.

Rounding off our tiny foursome was Francis Polizio, a gentleman and a gentle man, a retired French teacher and dealer in antiques. Our gathering — Marilyn, Ed, Fran and me — certainly was companionable. I still enjoy divine friendships with Ed and Fran. But it is Marilyn I can’t forget.

I didn’t know her but I knew her — her face had a wise,  porcelain finish, almost Eurasian though, in truth, it was Germanic. Her skin, birthday pink and flower petal-gentle and her demeanor, equally soft, belied a searing intellect; her mind was a wide avenue of tolerance, of carnal acceptance, of ideas, an unapologetic Socialist back when it was traitorous, anathema to be so.

She was wearing just the right clothes — her skirt made a reassuring, rustling sound when she moved. She had a Sunday look. Marilyn had, yes, the look of a nun minus totally, of course, the antiseptic patina that ends any  further interest you might have meeting most religious — a sensuous nun, that’s it!

Her hostess radar honed in on my nervousness and she sat down so close beside me, I could taste her perfume. She was your silent confidante, an instant chum; an expansive nature lent her an instant familiarity. She and her home and her place in the world made everyone, everything near her cozy. Ed said “Marilyn radiated warmth”. Slender as a thread of saffron, she covered you in quilt-y comfort; you didn’t want to budge from it. Not ever. It was that palpable.

Her home radiated the same — there was about Marilyn and her apartment a fragrance of gentility, that essence almost impossible to find now. Have you ever seen the Panorama Easter Eggs so popular in the ’60s? Delicately ornate, flowered, candied ceramic eggs. When your eyes peered into the little window, they were treated to the most shimmering scenes: miniature seed gardens, poppy-colored ducklings, thatched cottages, opalescent fields where horses trotted and rabbits ran. Marilyn’s place made me remember those bagatelles of my boyhood — to enter was to be greeted by an absolute wonderland of objects and odors and sounds — the loveliest, most meaningful of all being Marilyn herself.

Over yonder, the stove popped and percolated with food – rich promises of tastes soon to be spooned out and enjoyed, the Christmas Eve excitement that seizes you wondering what the morning will bring. You could hardly stand the waiting so intoxicating was it — and when our meal finally was revealed — a great table of scallops with the roe still attached, the sweetest roasted yams, the best asparagus, the endless supply of wine.  Marilyn served it up Nana-style and we — the self-dubbed Four Francophiles — feasted and were at peace…

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I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about guests,  and about being a guest, a guest in someone else’s house or — their guest at a restaurant but that’s not quite the same, is it?  I mean, dining at the house of someone I haven’t met before, the feelings that develop when strangers get together to share food and drink and conversation. If you stop to think about it, it is such a common occurrence but is, in fact, really odd. Do you agree with me? The ways in which communal eating and drinking become instruments that draw people who don’t know each other together in harmony. Think of this as miracle — think of this and be amazed — that in a world of nine billion people — billion!  — we are given the blessing of eating with another person, or a small party of others, for an hour, an evening, a weekend, an afternoon. For a brief period of time, we are company for each other, share a special moment and then perhaps never see each other again. We mean to. We say we will, we must. We offer the unspoken, intimate whisper that next time, “It will be ‘just us’. Then someone moves away, or finishes college, or marries, enters the seminary, stops speaking to us without warning or explanation. Life and Death intervene.

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Marilyn got very sick very fast. Our time together was brief, an evening really. There followed cards at birthdays and holidays, “hellos” conveyed through Ed. But illness became her constant companion and she grew self-conscious of her deterioration. She closed her door to even lifelong friends. She made a valiant attempt to get to Ed’s to see us at his annual Christmas feast but phoned to say she was too weak to even make it to the corner to hail a cab. In May, I was listening to Joni Mitchell singing, “Nothing lasts for long…” when Ed’s email came saying “Marilyn died”.

I fell in love with Marilyn Schaefer in one breath. There was something indelible about her, about “there”, there being where she was and lived. I still see her. I feel her. I keep thinking about being a guest, about what that means. About why some people will take a stranger into their home and nourish them and love them, without question. I keep remembering that evening in that Upper West Side apartment. Outside — the mad, Manhattan circus. Inside — Marilyn and cozy repose.

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You are equally loved, if not more loved, eating with one friend, or a couple of friends, as you would have been feasting among the multitudes in Great, Old Babylon or being one of The Twelve seated at Our Lord’s Last Meal.

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The Four Francophiles

Marilyn with one of her paintings

One of the early dumpling evenings