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Decoration Day at the Ladd and Whitney Monument in Lowell, Massachusetts
Created by Simon Towle, Photographer, 92 Merrimack Street. From the New York Public Library’s Digital Library of stereoscopic views.
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‘Memorial Day Bridges’
I wrote this poem one Memorial Day in the late 1970s. I was living in Dracut, where I had attended an early morning tribute to veterans. Afterwards, I drove to northeast Maine to see a friend from high school who had moved to the Bangor area. I roughed out the poem…
Read More »Memorial Day Address: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Here’s the text of the famous 1884 Memorial Day speech by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the Boston-born Civil War veteran who served on the US Supreme Court. His parents were the doctor-poet Oliver Wendell Holmes and abolitionist Amelia Lee Jackson. He enlisted in the army in his senior year at Harvard…
Read More »Jay Atkinson on ‘Fathers’ in Boston Globe Magazine
Author and Methuen-man Jay Atkinson has an essay about fathers, dads, in today’s Boston Globe Magazine. Read the essay here, and get the Globe if you want more.
Read More »Neil Young & John Greenleaf Whittier of the Merrimack Valley
Today’s NYTimes includes a capsule review of Neil Young’s new recording, “A Treasure,” which features a song inspired by the writing of poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier, most often associated with Haverhill and Amesbury, but also a former Lowell resident when he was the editor of a newspaper in the Spindle City:…
Read More »Remember Origin of Memorial Day ~ Exerpts from an Editorial
New Hampshire will be more and more in the news as the “would be” Republicans trek north in search of that momentum that the eventual GOP presidential nominee needs. Editorial space will soon be overcome with their antics and activities. Before the onslaught – please note some exerpts from a…
Read More »John Fitzgerald Kennedy ~ Born in Massachusetts May 29, 1917
A biography from the White House: John F. Kennedy On November 22, 1963, when he was hardly past his first thousand days in office, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was killed by an assassin’s bullets as his motorcade wound through Dallas, Texas. Kennedy was the youngest man elected President; he was the…
Read More »Writer Jonathan Franzen Says ‘Love,’ Don’t Just ‘Like’
In today’s NYTimes, writer Jonathan Franzen advises graduates at Kenyon College and all of us to be brave enough to go past “like” to the “love” setting on our emotional temperature control setting. Read the essay here, and get the NYT if you want more of this kind of writing.
Read More »In Lowell and Beyond: Artifacts, Stories, Memorabilia, Ephemera Help Tell the Civil War Story
This “Matthew Brady Studio” portrait was probably made in the spring of 1864, around the time U.S. Grant put General Benjamin F. Butler in command of the Army of the James River. The Sesquicentennial commemoration of the American Civil War began in earnest last month. Locally, the story has been…
Read More »1990. 1972. Bruins in June.
Horton from Krejci: Goal. (Web photo by Brian Snyder courtesy of Reuters) Boston is back in the Stanley Cup finals for the first time since 1990 for a chance to win it all for the first time since 1972, the Bobby Orr era. I was a senior in high school…
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