Author Archive

Living Madly: Small Things

Living Madly: Small Things By Emilie-Noelle Provost Love and kindness are never wasted. It’s the sort of cliché you might find on a greeting card or in a self-help book. Most people I know tend to scoff at this type of sentimentality. It sounds sappy, too simplistic to have much…

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Kisses (PIP 19)

Kisses – (PIP #19) By Louise Peloquin      Heart-shaped boxes of chocolates, bouquets of roses, colorful cards and the year’s gadgets are all exchanged on Valentine’s Day. So are kisses. L’Etoile published the following photo 80 years ago. Pure joy emanates from the low-definition image. A guitarist strums a tune.…

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Lowell Politics newsletter: Feb 11, 2024

Tuesday night’s Lowell City Council meeting was largely uneventful, which is not necessarily a bad thing. There was the obligatory winter-time segment on potholes of which there are many. City Manager Tom Golden cited an enormous quantity of blacktop used by DPW workers to fill these holes which seem to…

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1926: Lowell Fraternal Societies

Over the past few months, I’ve written several blog posts about Lowell in 1926. Why that year? It’s partly because of the upcoming bicentennial of the city. Yes, “bicentennial” means 200 years ago, but when we observe that anniversary, it will also be important to understand what Lowell was like…

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News Briefs from L’Etoile

News Briefs – (PIP #18) By Louise Peloquin Every day, the Prince Street linotype operators arouse L’Etoile’s five Mergenthalers (1) by tapping on their 90-character keyboards. The grand machines assemble matrices and spit out lines of hot metal to cast them into a single slug. These pieces are set to print newspaper…

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Lowell Politics Newsletter: Feb 4, 2024

At Tuesday night’s meeting, the Lowell City Council moved efficiently through a short agenda, completing the meeting in just 90 minutes. One thing that contributed to the meeting’s brevity was the presence of just five motion responses on the agenda. With 15 new motions passed the same night, simple math…

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When Nothing Can Help

When Nothing Can Help By Malcolm Sharps One of the rare curiosities of Central European travel is to make the crossing from Hungary to Slovakia underground by way of the Dobsina-Aggtelek cave system, which in all is 21km in length. On my first visit to Aggtelek, I met with no such lucky opportunity;…

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Lowell Hosts

Lowell Hosts- (PIP #17) By Louise Peloquin Lowell is known for its success in managing large crowds. To provide one example, the Lowell Folk Festival, started in 1990 after two years of hosting the National Folk Festival, is the longest-running free folk festival in the United States. Every July, thousands…

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Richard Howe Substack: Jan 28, 2024

The Lowell City Council met on Tuesday night with a potentially long agenda being handled in an expeditious 2.5 hours. Because of last week’s ruling by the City Solicitor that all unanswered motions from the last Council session died at the end of that session, this week’s agenda contained a…

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Lowell 1926: Parochial Schools

Another in a series of excerpts from the 1926 Lowell City Directory. This post contains information on parochial schools in Lowell: Greek Parochial School – Broadway, corner of Worthen Immaculate Conception School – 2 High Street – Grey Nuns Keith Academy – Thorndike Street Notre Dame Academy – 311 Adams…

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