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Two weeks ago Friday I found myself at Logan Airport’s Terminal C at 8:30 at night awaiting the arrival of a family member in bound for a Christmas visit. Despite having had two earlier flights cancelled by the mammoth storm that had engulfed much of the country that day and…
Read More »Lowell Year in Review: 2022 Here are ten events, local and national, that were significant in Lowell politics in 2022: The first City Council and School Committee elected under the newly adopted hybrid system of local government took office in January. Three councilors were elected city-wide, and eight were elected…
Read More »Baseball on the Moon By David Daniel The mercury, when I’d left the guard mount a few hours earlier, stood at 30. The air felt colder now and I was glad I’d zipped the liner into my field jacket. It was New Year’s Eve, 1969. I’d pulled guard duty, swapped…
Read More »Who wrote Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue? By Malcolm Sharps That was the question. Correct. Who wrote Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue? The answer would appear to be a no-brainer: George Gershwin did. But it’s a less straight-forward question than it seems. If I ask the question in another way: who wrote…
Read More »December 25, 1922, fell on a Sunday. The weather was seasonal with no storms to disrupt the holiday. Local merchants were happy with their volume of sales, and downtown streets were crowded with shoppers, especially on the Thursday night before Christmas. All the streetcars were packed that evening with people…
Read More »Back in December 2012, 56 people from Lowell came together to recite “A Visit from St. Nicholas” by Clement Clark Moore. If the embedded video above doesn’t work HERE is a link to the video on YouTube.
Read More »This article, slightly revised, appeared first in Merrimack Valley Magazine in December 2021 when Covid had become part of daily life. Invited to write a piece about holiday time in the area, I dialed back to my childhood and later college years when downtown Lowell was a magnet for people…
Read More »This essay by Henri Marchand was first heard in 2008 as a radio essay on the “Sunrise” program of WUML, 92.5 FM, at UMass Lowell. Today we continue our tradition of reposting the essay each year at Christmas. The Perfect Tree By Henri Marchand We begin the holiday season engaged…
Read More »This essay by Henri Marchand was first heard as a radio essay on the “Sunrise” program of WUML, 92.5 FM, at UMass Lowell. Today we continue our tradition of reposting the essay each year at Christmas. The Christmas Fruitcake: An Ageless Tradition By Henri Marchand I think there…
Read More »Christmas with the Kanes By David Daniel The exchanging of cards at the holidays remains a quaint, if vanishing, tradition. For a time, it gave ground to the “holiday letter”—pages of cheery mimeographed minutiae. But even those have waned, the impetus to show lives in perfect balance largely siphoned…
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