RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

A mystery and a period piece by Marjorie Arons-Barron

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

Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford is a quickly unspooling, cinematic mystery set in the fictional city of Cahokia, during the 1920’s. (The real Cahokia had vanished by 1200 C.E., leaving behind only mounds of grass-covered dirt in Illinois, near the meeting of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers.) The population of author Spufford’s Cahokia is divided among takouma (Native Americans), takatas (of European extraction) and, to a lesser extent, taklousa (African Americans).

Spufford starts the story with the discovery of a dead body on the roof of an office building in the financial district. The body (a takata- of European descent) has had his throat cut and his body disfigured in a very gory way with a mysterious symbol written in blood. The two detectives in charge of the case are Phineas Drummond, a morally compromised, hardened cop (takata), and rookie Joe Barrow, (a takouma-taklousa mix), brought up in an orphanage. Barrow, who emerges as this thriller’s protagonist, often serves as interlocutor between and among different constituent groups. Initially reticent, he comes to assert his own point of view, informed by his growing realization that power doesn’t necessarily equate to good and evil is not confined to a single faction.

Author Spufford portrays a Cahokia in which indigenous people (takouma), despite being disdained by whites (and targeted by the local Ku Klux Klan), actually wield a significant amount of community clout. But whites hold the financial power, the banks, the utilities and valuable real estate. The Catholic Church, whose Jesuits had converted many indigenous people (deemed “savages”), also figures prominently.  The murder was intentionally ordered to stir fears of white people and instigate citywide chaos, which plays out over the week covered by the narrative.

There are other killings, romances, riots and numerous plot twists throughout, as well as colorful characters, smokey speakeasies, lurking dangers and jazz clubs. Barrow himself is a gifted jazz pianist and ponders throughout the book whether to remain a cop or to make music a career. As in a film noir, he is drawn to a powerful, seductive woman, who is not quite what she seems.

The book was among top books of 2023 on NY Times, NPR, New Yorker and other lists. For this reader, it is sometimes difficult to remember who’s on first, but the suspense builds from the opening chapter to the very last page. There is a lot of very painterly writing and layers of Indian symbols and Catholic myths. Book clubs will have a field day decoding all the layers of meaning.  That, in itself, combined with an appealing protagonist and intriguing narrative twists, makes Cahokia Jazz a compelling read.

Lowell Politics: August 10, 2025

During the summer, the Lowell City Council meets on the second and fourth Tuesdays of each month. That usually translates to a meeting every other week, but this year’s calendar has given us a gap of three weeks between meetings with the next one coming this Tuesday, August 12, 2025. (The council last met on July 22, 2025.)

With the city’s preliminary election just a month away, today’s newsletter will preview that and the November 4, 2025, city election.

Under our city electoral system, anytime there are more than twice as many candidates as there are seats to be filled for a particular office, there must be a preliminary election to reduce the number of candidates to just twice the number of seats to be filled. For example, in a city council district there is one seat so if there are three or more candidates eligible for election, there must be a preliminary election in which the top two finishers move on to the November election. Similarly, there are three at-large council seats so if there were seven or more candidates, a preliminary would be required to reduce the number of candidates to six, which is double the number of seats to be filled. When only some districts require a preliminary election, that election is only held for those districts. All candidates for the other districts automatically advance to the November election.

This year, three council districts will have preliminary elections which will be held on Tuesday, September 9, 2025:

District 3 city councilor

The District 3 city councilor represents Belvidere. There are four candidates:

• Corey A. Belanger (incumbent)
• Daniel Finn
• Erin M. Gendron
• Belinda M. Juran

District 7 city councilor

The District 7 city councilor represents the Acre. There are three candidates:

• Jose De Jesus Cervantes
• Sidney L. Liang
• Paul Ratha Yem (incumbent)

District 8 city councilor

The District 8 city councilor represents the Upper Highlands. There are three candidates:

• Marcos A. Candido Jr.
• John G. Descoteaux (incumbent)
• Francisco Maldonado Jr.

Again, these three offices will be on the ballot on September 9, 2025. This past Friday, the city’s election office held a drawing to determine the order in which the candidates would appear on the ballot in the preliminary election. Here is the result:

District 3

1. Daniel Finn
2. Corey A. Belanger
3. Erin M. Gendron
4. Belinda M. Juran

District 7

1. Jose De Jesus Cervantes
2. Sidney L. Liang
3. Paul Ratha Yem

District 8

1. Francisco Maldonado Jr.
2. Marcos A. Candido Jr.
3. John G. Descoteaux

(In the November election per state law, incumbents come first on the ballot in alphabetical order followed by challengers, also in alphabetical order.)

If you wish to vote by mail in that and subsequent elections this year, you must request a mail in ballot from the city’s election office. This can be done on the Vote-By-Mail page of the election office website.

Looking ahead to the final election on Tuesday, November 4, 2025, here are the offices and candidates that will be on the ballot that day:

CITY COUNCIL

At-Large City Councilors (top three elected)

Three city councilors are elected citywide, so they are on the ballot in every district. There are five candidates. The top three finishers will win seats on the council:

• Sixto DeJesus
• Erik Robert Gitschier (incumbent)
• Emile Herman Kaufman
• Rita M. Mercier (incumbent)
• Vesna Nuon (incumbent)

District 1 city councilor

The District 1 city councilor represents Pawtucketville. There is one candidate:

• Daniel P. Rourke (incumbent)

District 2 city councilor

The District 2 city councilor represents Centralville. There is one candidate:

• Corey Michael Robinson (incumbent)

District 3 city councilor

The District 3 city councilor represents Belvidere. The top two finishers in the preliminary will be on the November ballot:

• Corey A. Belanger (incumbent)
• Daniel Finn
• Erin M. Gendron
• Belinda M. Juran

District 4 city councilor

The District 4 city councilor represents downtown, Back Central, and part of Pawtucketville. There are two candidates:

• Wayne C. Jenness Jr. (incumbent)
• Sean McDonough

District 5 city councilor

The District 5 city councilor represents South Lowell. There are two candidates:

• Sherri O’Conor Barboza
• Kimberly Ann Scott (incumbent)

District 6 city councilor

The District 6 city councilor represents the Lower Highlands. There is one candidate:

• Sokhary Chan Chau (incumbent)

District 7 city councilor

The District 7 city councilor represents the Acre. The top two finishers in the preliminary will be on the November ballot:

• Jose De Jesus Cervantes
• Sidney L. Liang
• Paul Ratha Yem (incumbent)

District 8 city councilor

The District 8 city councilor represents the Upper Highlands. The top two finishers in the preliminary will be on the November ballot:

• Marcos A. Candido Jr.
• John G. Descoteaux (incumbent)
• Francisco Maldonado Jr.

SCHOOL COMMITTEE

The Lowell School Committee consists of six members elected by the voters plus the mayor who is elected by fellow city councilors. Of the elected members of the school committee, two are elected city wide in “at large” seats, and four are elected to single member districts. Each school committee district consists of two city council districts.

This year, the four district incumbents are all running unopposed, so they are guaranteed reelection. They are Fred W. Bahou in District 1, Eileen P. DelRossi in District 2; David Joseph Conway in District 3; and Dominik Hok Lay in District 4.

For the two citywide seats on the school committee, there are four candidates. Because that is exactly double the two seats to be filled, there is no need for a preliminary election. The top two of the following candidates in the November election will therefore win seats on the School Committee:

• Zoe F. Dzineku
• Robert Joseph Hoey Jr.
• Connie A. Martin (incumbent)
• Danielle Marie McFadden

CAMPAIGN FINANCE

City Council candidates must report donations received and funds spent to the state’s Office of Campaign and Public Finance (OCPF) which makes the information publicly available on its website. Candidates for school committee report their finances to the city’s Election Office which makes those reports available on its website.

For current council candidates, here are the latest numbers – beginning balance at the start of 2025; amount raised and reported thus far in 2025; amount spent thus far; and cash on hand:

At-Large city councilors

• Sixto DeJesus: new account; raised $9577; spent $4799; balance $4778
• Erik Robert Gitschier: start $2482; raised $11,756; sent $3392; bal. $10,846
• Emile Herman Kaufman: no reports filed
• Rita M. Mercier: start $15,912; raised $4188; spent $2967; bal. $17,133
• Vesna Nuon: start $10,598; raised $10,628; spent $8215; bal. $13,235

District 1 city councilor

• Daniel P. Rourke: start $23,761; raised $500; spent $3179; bal. $21,082

District 2 city councilor

• Corey Michael Robinson: start $4204; raised $7475; spent $4434; bal. $7246

District 3 city councilor

• Corey A. Belanger: start $3790; raised $9405; spent $2904; bal. $10,291
• Daniel Finn: start $1482; raised $7511; spent $4720; bal. $4272
• Erin M. Gendron: new acct; raised $9780; spent $4367; bal. $5413
• Belinda M. Juran: new acct; raised $21,037; spent $9090; bal. $11,947

District 4 city councilor

• Wayne C. Jenness Jr.: start $4976; raised $500; spent $727; bal. $4749
• Sean McDonough: new acct; raised $4030; spent $1866; bal. $2164

District 5 city councilor

• Sherri O’Conor Barboza: no reports filed
• Kimberly Ann Scott: start $7954; raised $8144; spent $728; bal. $15,370

District 6 city councilor

• Sokhary Chan Chau: start $587; raised $13,567; spent $11,226; bal. $2929

District 7 city councilor

• Jose De Jesus Cervantes: new acct; raised $3289; spent $2289; bal. $988
• Sidney L. Liang: new acct; raised $6838; spent $3906; bal. $2931
• Paul Ratha Yem: start $1640; raised $3161; spent $1203; bal. $3598

District 8 city councilor

• Marcos A. Candido Jr.: new acct; raised $442; spent $120; bal. $322
• John G. Descoteaux: start $5884; raised $9045; spent $1525; bal. $13,404
• Francisco Maldonado Jr.: new acct: raised $28,643; spent $15,845; bal. $12,983

Here are some highlights of the above finance information:

Largest beginning balance: Dan Rourke with $17,361

Most money raised thus far: Francisco Maldonado Jr raised $28,643

Most money spent thus far: Francisco Maldonado Jr. spent $15,845

Most money on hand: Dan Rourke with $21,082

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On Wednesday, August 20, 2025, at 6 pm at the Pollard Memorial Library’s ground floor meeting room, I will give a talk on “The Founding of Lowell” in conjunction with the city’s upcoming bicentennial. The event is free and does not require advance registration.

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This week on richardhowe.com:

Eoin Reilly writes about his late father, Robert T. Reilly, a Lowell native who ran track with Ed McMahon and Jack Kerouac at Lowell High, and who went on to lead a fascinating life.

Charlie Gargiulo wrote about meeting the Kinks in 1970 when they performed at Lowell’s Commodore Ballroom.

Leo Racicot recalls what it was like in Lowell in 1968.

Louise Peloquin wrote about efforts 100 years ago to ensure that milk was healthy for people to consume.

Paul Marion wrote about purple loosestrife, the spiky plant that grows throughout the region.

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My YouTube channel this week visits Lowell’s Public Art Trail, a collection of a dozen outdoor sculptures around the downtown.

Remembering My Father, Robert T. Reilly

Remembering My Father, Robert T. Reilly

By Eoin Reilly

So my father wrote a lot. He also was from Lowell and ran track with Ed McMahon and Jack Kerouac. Oh…he also had a lot of kids and moved to where he could afford to raise them without crime being involved. And it’s the Lowell Folk Festival today. Normally, I am there having a great time with food and song, but today I am, for my sins, in Boston instead.

Hello to anyone out there reading this. I saw a Boston Globe article by Stephen O’Connor that referenced one of my dad’s books. I still get around fifty dollars a year from it, usually then given to one of the afore-mentioned siblings who is down and out. We pretty much all do that because one of us (or more) is always broke. The Disney film The Fighting Prince of Donegal was based on a book my dad wrote for what we now call “young adults” but which previously were referred to as “Shitheads.” I think he published somewhere around fifteen books. Many were non-fiction, perhaps also written for shitheads. Writing was his avocation. To make money, he was a showman. He did advertising in Nebraska, where his ad campaign for Old Home Bread brought forth C.W. McCall and a really bad movie with a great songwriter (Kris Kristofferson) in it. He also ran for congress as a Democrat in 1970, a voice against the war in Vietnam that nearly made me grow up in D.C., likely to have ended life at a young age with a dirty needle in my arm in some dank place somewhere between Akron and Algiers. He went to war in 1944, promptly getting captured and imprisoned so as to be bombed by allies, have an out-of-body experience after which he returned to his stricken barracks, and then to consume numerous Red Cross chocolate bars as yet another bomb run by us moved along his stalled train car as the Nazis retreated with their commitments further into Germany.

Then he came home. He married my mom and tried to get BC to accept his Jesuitical classwork from before he volunteered for a war worth fighting. They didn’t. He started having kids and worked his education elsewhere. Lots of jobs. A move west after his third kid and just short of his PhD. In philosophy, I think. More kids ensued in Omaha. Seven more, in fact. He started to write, perhaps to keep himself hopeful in what must have been very skint times. Funny, but he never wrote about Lowell. Gramma still lived there, other than her annual trips out to the colonies to see us. He still lost or found his “r’s” from time to time, but the steady in my childhood was the sound of Dad in the attic typing two-fingered on the Smith Corona he bought in 1947 and used until he couldn’t type anymore somewhere approaching or passing the new millennium. Lots of books, articles, letters (he wrote back to everyone who ever wrote him), and dribbles of poems and film scripts were my nighttime sonata. He listened to Harry Belafonte and played (very, very badly) the bongos or the spoons when the muse left him or when his fingers just got tired.

He would be appalled at this stream of consciousness submission, as he once told me that writers edit until they just get too tired. Books on Irish topics intermingled with stories about the tribes of the plains, with the odd bit somewhere in between also making its way to publication. He pretty much always wrote. As the second son, I was supposed to be a priest. The volunteer army was just starting back then, so I got recruiting calls from various branches of the armed forces as well as from the Jesuits (who taught me, somewhat) and the Columban Fathers, who enticed me with promise of little food, hot weather, and disease. Dad just kept writing, but he now had fewer mouths to feed and so took a monstrous cut in salary to leave advertising (which he hated) in order to return to Academia (which he loved, minus the meetings and protocols). He always spoke well, almost reverently, of Jack Kerouac. Two things stuck out from what he told us. Firstly, Kerouac was a patriot and had little time for the hippies and all of my other heroes. Secondly, he was a Catholic. These two things were somehow lost as soon as I read Kerouac rather than heard about how Dad gloried in his writings but sorrowed in his life experiences. An early memory of Kerouac is Dad’s telling me of how Kerouac was offered a scholarship by BC, which the owner of the Lowell Sun attended. When he went to Columbia instead, the owner of the Sun retaliated by firing Kerouac’s father, a printer at the Sun.

My dad was a bit of a stir-stick. He had no tolerance for many things. Some of these things he dealt with by acting the fool. For example, he never convinced us that the Chrysler zooming past us on the interstate actually looked in the rearview mirror to notice my father holding the garage door opener to his mouth as if to report erratic driving to the local enforcers. Other things were of more note. He left the Knights of Columbus in the late 1950s after they refused membership to one of his black friends who was a Catholic of the wrong color. He was part of the group in Omaha led by a boozing (recovered) Jesuit chaplain who saw too much blood in too many wars to maintain any belief that white equals right, engaging in protests at restaurants and factories before Selma and other southern sufferings made the news. He was very proud that I became an immigration lawyer. I know his parsimony was a reflection of his Depression era reality, but so was his belief that a government exists only to serve the commonwealth. Hoboes excepted. He had no truck with hoboes.

So I first read Dharma Bums and went on to too-few other books by Kerouac. Dad said he and Ed McMahon were the “Irish Boys” Kerouac referred to in either The Town and the City or Maggie Cassidy; I don’t remember which. He died in Omaha after completing his set task of burying my mother, who preceded him by six weeks. He left a family that cherishes the written word the way it should be cherished. Two of my siblings have also published books, and others of us have added the odd chapter here and there to some topic of interest. He also, according to the owner (circa 2000-ish) of the Owl Diner, still has gum left under the table there. He wrote, sang, and laughed his way about raising us the way men usually do. His love for my mom was monumental and shows me which way to turn from time to time. I like to think that my trips up to Lowell are things that he still sees and that the hotdogs I eat at Elliot’s differ only in price from the ones he ate there in the 1930s.

Thanks for reading this. Dad makes me grin in his memory.

Remembering 1968 (by Leo Racicot)

Remembering 1968

By Leo Racicot

Even now, almost sixty years later, when I hear the year 1968 mentioned, my mind instantly goes to April and June of that awful year. In April, the great Civil Rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr., was gunned down by an assassin, James Earl Ray, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, only a day after delivering his rousing. now historic I Have Been to the Mountaintop speech in that city. A terrible day for America; echoes of the murder of President John F. Kennedy a mere five years before hit Americans and the world hard. Watching King’s widow, Coretta, her grief-stricken face shrouded in black, her young children by her side, marching behind her slain husband’s coffin, brought back the still raw vision of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s ravaged face as she walked the same sad route in 1963. Violence erupted across the country. The sight of seeing black protesters hosed down like dogs in the street by militia has never left me. Is it any wonder I am loathe to take myself back to those years.

In June, following a stirring victory acceptance speech at California’s Ambassador Hotel, presidential frontrunner, Robert Kennedy, left the stage to cheers and was gunned down in the kitchen area by extremist, Sirhan Sirhan. New York Giant’s defensive tackle, Roosevelt “Rosey” Grier restrained the killer, saving countless other lives. Someone placed a rosary in Kennedy’s hands as he lay in his own blood on the floor of the hotel. It was an instant flashback to his brother’s murder in 1963. America was expanding and contracting, expanding and contracting, with hate, with rage, with change, and seemed on the verge of implosion.

I remember that summer as being among the hottest. The decision was made to bring Kennedy’s body by train across America from Los Angeles to D.C., stopping along the way to let mourners pause and pray and weep. It was the slowest train ride ever witnessed. Millions came out to say  “goodbye”. I remember we had a tiny black-and-white portable tv in the kitchen. Anthony Kalil was visiting and my sister was there. We brought a kitchen chair out onto the porch, placed the tv on top, and the three of us watched in absolute silence. It was I remember a summer of heat and abject terror. Protesters against the war in Vietnam and America’s involvement in “the unwinnable conflagration” took to the streets in record numbers across the nation.

It was a dangerous, menacing time, and here in Lowell, I remember having to walk by an encampment of Hell’s Angels off School Street across from Pevey Street. I was on my way to meet my friends, Scott Jackson and Jimmy Sullivan. When the three of us came out of their house, the Angels were blasting Eric Burdon and the Animals’ Sky Pilot so loudly, the ground underneath our feet was shaking and we decided to go around the long way. To this day, scratch my head in amazement that such a rowdy group of thugs were playing one of the era’s most demonstrative anti-Vietnam protest songs. Later, I was told they were readying themselves to act as security for a protest rally on South Common.

The airwaves, too, were filled with the anti-war anthems of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton. Between the loss of its beloved Bobby Kennedy and the Vietnam War, America and Americans were shattered, perhaps more so when Richard Nixon won White House in the Fall election.

Just as The Beatles had helped heal a grieving world in the aftermath of President Kennedy’s assassination by appearing suddenly on the world stage, taking music and culture by the horns, so they did the same when RFK was killed. In September, on The David Frost Show, they debuted what then became the longest running song ever recorded, Hey Jude. In  a landmark performance. As the Fab Four began the song, they were joined on stage by dozens of members from the audience and crew, who joined them in the lyric, Nah Nah nah, nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah Hey, Jude! Television and the music industry had never presented a production like it.

Within days, Hey Jude was everywhere. I have a wistful, very dear memory of being in Anthony Kalil’s basement. His cousin, Vanessa, was strumming her guitar, giving a group of us a solo mini-concert. She began with the mournful 500 Miles and her sad, brown eyes, her sad strumming made it even more mournful. She then segued into Hey, Jude, bidding us chime in on the chorus. I still see her there atop the stool, in that basement. Time has stood still on that visual. Vanessa, like so many others of our time, died young of a heroin overdose.

A summer day, a Saturday. Our mother wasn’t awake and up at the usual time. The right side of her body was slouched in the bed and the same side of her face was drooping, her lip twisted in an odd angle. I called an ambulance and it brought her to Lowell General Hospital. She’d had a stroke. Aunt Marie and Nana took the reins of Diane’s and my care. In those times, children weren’t allowed to visit patients in hospitals so, every night after she got out of work, Marie would take us to wait under our mother’s hospital room window. She’d go up and help Ma to the window where we’d wave and blow kisses. I still can see my mother in that window. Now, personal fear and sorrow were added to the ones in the news.

Marie had the great idea that she’d renovate our home. She thought if Ma came home to a wholly new apartment, it would help in the healing process. She recruited Diane and me to help. We accompanied her to carpet shops, paint and wallpaper stores, furniture stores and the three of us set out to transform the first floor of 5 Willie Street. After three weeks of physical therapy, our mother came back to herself and returned home. Boy, Marie couldn’t have been more wrong. Our mother had been eager to return home to familiar surroundings: her treasures, her treasured photographs. The shock of coming home to a strange place upset her and she cried and cried. She was never the same person after that scary summer. In the years ahead, she suffered one stroke after another. In fact, it seemed that every time she rallied once more from one, she’d have another. She died at the age of 84 from a cerebral hemorrhage on Thanksgiving Eve of that year.

In September of that year, I met Joe Markiewicz. We were freshmen starting out at Lowell High School. I was sitting in History Class, A period, with teacher Frank Finnerty. I was facing to the left talking with David McKean when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to find this kid next to me, smiling. He said, “Aren’t you in my Phys. Ed. class, C period? I said, “I don’t know” and resumed chatting with David. At the next C period, I was toweling off after gym when, once again, there came a tap on my shoulder. It was the same kid from History Class. He said, “See!”.  Thus began what has become a 57 years long friendship. So, 1968’s always been The Year I Met Joe, one of the few good things that terrible year brought me.

In December, NASA’s Apollo 8 crew headed for the moon. One of the astronauts, William Anders, was looking out the window of their space capsule when he spied the Earth coming up over the horizon and asked his colleague to hand him his camera. The shot he captured came to be known as Earthrise, the first ever view the world would have of what the Earth looked like from this perspective. The serene and green image of our Planet belied the chaos and confusion of what was happening on it. It gave hope to a hopeless world and ended the year on a high note.

Joe and other members of the Lowell High Math Club, 1968

Antiwar protestors in downtown Lowell, 1968

Hell’s Angels in Lowell, 1968

Fatally wouned RFK comforted by busboy Juan Romero Ambassador Hotel

Coretta Scott King & children in funeral procession of Martin Luther Kings Jr.

500 miles from my home

“Earthrise” by William Anders