RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

Seen & Heard: Vol. 21

Event: Lowell in World War II Walking Tour: On Saturday, Bob Forrant and I led 30 people around downtown Lowell, sharing stories about the city during World War II. The main theme was how war production temporarily rescued the remaining Lowell mills and boosted employment and wages for Lowell residents who had suffered through almost two decades of hard times. We also talked about organized labor, the military draft, how the city honored those who gave their lives in the military, and how the war was financed through “war bond” drives that united the community. 

Television: America’s Bookclub on C-Span. David Rubenstein interviews the historian Candice Millard who has written several best selling books, the best known of which may be Destiny of the Republic which is about the assassination of President James Garfield. She grew up in Ohio in a blue collar family. Both of her parents loved to read. She went to a small college in the midwest then worked at National Geographic where she worked for six years when she wrote her first book, River of Doubt, which is about Theodore Roosevelt’s post politics journey up an unknown in South America.

YouTube: Google I/O 2026 – Google I/O is Google’s annual developer conference which was held this year on May 19-20, 2026, in Mountain View, California. I watched the keynote address by the company’s CEO and several of its top executives. The purpose of the presentation I watched was to announce new things in artificial intelligence and Google products and systems. For a variety of reasons, I never found my way into the Apple universe and landed on Google as a comprehensive alternative. I use it for email, calendar, writing, entertainment (I watch YouTube more than anything else on TV) and my Pixel phone, watch and tablet. Perhaps the biggest announcement was a further shift by Google away from its traditional “search” function that would return a bunch of hyperlinks to websites in reply to your query with greater reliance on AI summaries. “AI mode” has been available in Google search for a while so it’s not completely new, but that functionality has been much expanded and made more dynamic in that you can ask follow up questions and almost engage in a dialog with the device. Other big announcements involved “coding” (using AI to write computer code) and “agentic AI” (having an agent automatically do things for you like order coffee or schedule an Uber based on some prompt embedded in your calendar, for instance). Finally, Google introduced an “intelligent eyewear” product, also known as smart glasses, which will compete with META which has the lead in this technology. 

Streaming: Late Night with Steven Colbert – I don’t watch much TV, certainly not any late night TV, and as much as I find the various hosts amusing, there is so much other content on YouTube that I find interesting that I don’t catch their clips there. However, I did watch a replay of the full final episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. I found the program entertaining and enjoyed watching, especially the musical finale which featured Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello and Jon Batiste. McCartney was the one guest who sat next to Colbert’s desk and talked in the traditional TV talk show way. The former Beatle was coherent and entertaining but he looked and sounded old (he’s 83), but when he sang, I thought the years melted away. There were several “comedy cameos” where different celebrities seated in the audience interrupted then expressed displeasure that they were not the final guest. Jon Stewart had an appearance as did the scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson. And Colbert’s four late night colleagues, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Myers and John Oliver, appeared as a group. The Colbert version of the Late Show has been around for 11 years which is a good run on TV, so if it had just been cancelled in normal times it would not have been such a cultural marker. But the wide perception is the show was cancelled by Paramount to earn favor from President Trump who had expressed annoyance at Colbert’s mockery of him. That context elevated the significance of this episode beyond the normal termination of a TV show. 

Obituary: Barney Frank – Former Congressman Barney Frank died on May 19, 2016, at age 86. Born and raised in Bayonne, New Jersey, Frank came to Massachusetts to attend Harvard and was in graduate school there when he was hired by Mayor Kevin White. In 1972, he was elected to the Massachusetts legislature and in 1980, when incumbent Congressman Robert Drinan, a Jesuit priest, had to relinquish his elected office due to a new policy from Pope John Paul II, Frank won that seat which he held until 2012 when he chose not to seek reelection. In 1987, he came out as gay, the first sitting member of Congress to do so publicly. In 2012, before his term ended, he married Jim Ready, making Frank the first member of Congress to have a spouse of the same sex. His most significant legislative achievement was the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act which tightened the rules on lenders in response to the meltdown of the housing market that led to the global financial crisis in 2007. Conservatives later argued that a main driver of the financial crash was risky loans that liberal politicians forced lenders to make to undeserving poor people. The reality is that lenders delighted in making those loans because the riskier the borrower, the higher the rate of interest the lender could charge, and none of the loans were held by the entities that made them – they cashed in their profits right as the loan was made – but were passed on to gullible investors who were left holding the bag when the bottom fell out.

When damaged people damage others by Marjorie Arons-barron

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

The Elements by prolific Irish writer John Boyne is an intense novel that takes you into the darkest places of human behavior and miraculously brings you into the light with a slender promise of hope. Broadly speaking, it is about depravity, crime, guilt, complicity, prostitution, pedophilia, rape, suicide, estrangement, betrayals, loss and reconciliation. And more.

The four sections of the book – water, earth, fire and air – designate four seemingly separate story lines, in each of which the principal character is at odds with the universe. Yet the book’s structure is intricately woven so that the characters are surprisingly intertwined. The behavior of individuals in each section has a profound and lasting impact on their own lives and produces ruinous results for others. Yet, at the end of the book, well…….I won’t spoil it for you.

Section One (water)  starts out in a small, beautiful island off the west coast of Ireland. It has 400 residents and a lot of livestock. The story is told in the first person, in this case, a woman taking refuge in a rented cottage and seeking anonymity, changing her name from Vanessa Carvin to Willow Hale. She has a dead daughter, Emma, and a husband (formerly an admired public figure) in jail. Her reputation – and his – have been irreparably damaged. What has been the damage to her remaining daughter, Rebecca, and how will that affect Rebecca’s future relationships?

The second part of the book (earth) starts in the same place with a teenage boy, Evan Keogh, who wants to be a painter but is pressured by his father to be a professional footballer (soccer pro to us Americans.) His first-person narrative is of his success on the pitch, paralleled by a dark downward spiral in the rest of his life, with stunning twists and turns.

And so it goes, from the second to the third to the fourth, with dark experiences and surprising revelations.

The reader meets women who remain loyal, even though victimized by unfaithful and treacherous men. Author Boyne also raises unsettling questions about women’s complicity through silence and by action.  We come to know men brutalized in their innocent boyhood by twisted women, getting revenge for something done to them when they were vulnerable girls.

Do the elements destroy everything, as some of the characters assert? Can we live harmoniously in the world, or is the universe against us? Some parts of this book will leave you shuddering. Some will have you wondering. Ultimately, The Elements will touch you deeply.

Toil, Repeat, Rehash

Toil, Repeat, Rehash – (PIP #107)

By Louise Peloquin

     Pop quizzes, tests and exams are punctuating student days as the school year comes to an end. This is a time to reflect upon how one can “learn well.”

The learning tips provided in the following editorial are not outdated. Furthermore, clear writing and correct spelling in any language have always been challenging for students young and old including for yours truly!

L’Etoile – January 23, 1926

IN ORDER TO LEARN WELL

     In the Figaro we find (1) the following excellent reflections. They are dedicated to studious youth and to teachers:

     “It is not at the age of 18 that good intellectual habits are formed; it is between 7 and 12. Fifty-year-olds have all had those excellent elementary school teachers who pursued their noble profession with so much passion that they managed to teach spelling which, of course, is not sufficient but is nonetheless indispensable and is a proof of intellectual solidity. Why, yes why do young people in 1925 not know how to spell? That is the anguishing question that I very respectfully ask the Minister of Public Education. Oh that he not create a commission to investigate the issue!

     We should make the effort to reflect that human beings do not know what they learn; that in order to learn it is necessary to toil, to repeat, to rehash. Yes, if you have not learned the rules by heart … if that child within you has not leapt with pride, after having navigated all of the pitfalls to succeed in producing that masterpiece which is a perfect dictation, you will never experience one of the greatest joys of learning.” (2)

****

1. First presented as a “journal littéraire”, Le Figaro was named after “The Marriage of Figaro”, Pierre-Augustin de Beaumarchais’s five-act comedy written in 1778. It began as a single sheet printed on January 15, 1826 and became a daily in 1866. Its motto is a line from the play: “Without the freedom to criticize, there is no flattering praise.” Its content includes coverage of the arts, sciences, lifestyle, national and international news, economics and politics. Over 400,500 paper copies of Le Figaro are distributed daily, making it France’s second-largest newspaper after Le Monde. More than 245,100,000 readers pay it an online “visit” every day.
2. Translation by Louise Peloquin.

“I’ll hold you in my heart”

Charlie Gargiulo, a good friend and the author if the wonderful memoir, Legends of Little Canada, sent an email the other day. He had just heard about the recent passing of fellow author David Daniel (who contributed many pieces to this site).

The loss Charlie felt on learning of Dave’s passing made him recall the song played on the accompanying video, “I’ll hold you in my heart.”

Charlie wrote the song back in December 1994, on the passing of Irv Zola, the chief architect of the American Disabilities Act and a teacher of medical sociology at Brandeis University. This version of the song is performed by Patti Sardella, who was one of Irv’s students. She performed it at his memorial service.

Since then, Charlie has offered the songs to friends to honor the passing of a loved one, including his own family upon the passing of his mother and his son, Charlie Jr. who is on the left in the photo that accompanies the recording (Charlie Sr. is in the center and his Uncle Arthur, a main character in the memoir, is on the right).

Charlie shares the song now in the hope that it might bring comfort to anyone who has experienced a loss, especially on this Memorial Day.

CLICK HERE to listen to the song on YouTube.