Author Archive

Ballots for those who will vote by mail are beginning to arrive at the homes of Lowell residents this week. Besides all the elected offices, there are also five referendum questions on this ballot. They haven’t received a lot of attention so I’ll start with a quick synopsis of each:…

My Back Pages and Dermot’s Theory By Stephen O’Connor In the winter of 1985, I was 29 years old. The snows melted away, and so did my time in that golden decade. As I approached my thirtieth birthday, people said to me, “So, how does it feel? The big 3-0…

Dropped Baby By David Daniel If you were around forty years ago you may remember the story.   A fire in a triple-decker tenement in Lowell, Massachusetts, on a December night so cold that the hydrants froze and firefighters had to use blow torches to open them. It was all…

Lowell celebrated Keraouc’s future friend – (PIP #42) By Louise Peloquin      An October gathering of Kerouac’s friends and admirers would definitely have included Fr. Armand Morrissette, O.M.I. (1910-1991) who recognized in adolescent Jack a talent which would become no less than stellar. “Father Spike” championed Jack even into eternity when,…

Tuesday’s Lowell City Council meeting took just under two hours to complete. No single issue dominated. In keeping with the civil engineering focus of this city council, motions and reports on traffic, parking, and related matters came up repeatedly. Nothing seems to delight this council more than a discussion on…

Philip A. Donahue passed away on September 17, 2024. (His obituary is available here.) His brother, Richard K. Donahue Jr., delivered his eulogy at his funeral mass at the Immaculate Conception Church in Lowell on September 27, 2024. Richard consented to the publication of his eulogy here: Eulogy for Philip…

Instruction – (PIP #41) By Louise Peloquin A hundred years ago, a call for instruction. L’Etoile, September 3, 1924 Instruction  (Of Liberty)         Our little schoolchildren, with schoolbags strapped over their shoulders, will soon return to school.      Vacation time and endless games will have lasted the lifespan of…

  The Impossible Dream: The 1967 Red Sox The end of another disappointing Red Sox season on Sunday was tempered by a Bob Ryan column in the Sunday Boston Globe about the importance of October 1st in the Red Sox universe. (“It was pivotal day in year that changed it…

At Tuesday’s Lowell City Council meeting, councilors received a comprehensive presentation from a representative of Commonwealth Care Alliance, a 20-year-old Boston-based nonprofit corporation that has contracted with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to operate the family emergency shelter program housed in the former UMass Lowell Inn & Conference Center in downtown…

From the Saint Laurence to the Merrimack and back By Louise Peloquin For several weeks, Dick Howe has been posting photos of Lowell monuments testifying to the city’s rich and varied past. Although the following monument is located 384 miles to the north, it commemorates the French-Canadian history which links…