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When I visited Washington, DC in the summer of 2011, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial was still under construction. It would officially open just a few weeks later on August 22. When I returned to DC two years later, a visit to the Memorial was high on my To…
Read More »Protecting the Capitol: 1861 & 2021 On April 19, 1861, about 200 soldiers from Lowell were attacked in Baltimore while en route to Washington, D.C., to protect the U.S. government from those who sought to overthrow it. The Lowell men were part of the Sixth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment that…
Read More »President Franklin Pierce: The Lowell Connection Thanks to Juliet Mofford for her excellent story (posted yesterday) about President Franklin Pierce and the tragic death of his son, Benny. While many probably knew that Pierce was from New Hampshire (the only president from our neighboring state), few may realize that Pierce’s…
Read More »The Train Wreck That Derailed a President by Julie Mofford “The burden of guilt I carry for a public career that destroyed my family will haunt me as long as I live.” – Franklin Pierce – Our 14th President Franklin Pierce, (1853 to 1857), had close ties to the…
Read More »The extra-Constitutional drama that accompanied yesterday’s procedural (as opposed to adjudicatory) counting of state electoral votes by Congress made me recall the contested presidential election of 2000. Here is an essay I wrote back then. It is in two parts: one before the outcome was determined; another afterwards. Remember as…
Read More »Five Rows Down and Three Across by Frank Wagner Five rows down and three across Through wild high grass of the burial ground We looked for old laid bones that could not be found. A generation has passed since his body was laid, Under piled dirt this skin and…
Read More »Terms commonly used during 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic Aerosol – virus particles emitted by an infected individual that are small enough to be suspended in the air for an extended period of time which may infect others. AstraZeneca – A drug company that teamed with Oxford University to create a Covid-19…
Read More »Paul Dickson’s 2020 book, The Rise of the G.I. Army, 1940-1941, has the subtitle “The forgotten story of how America forged a powerful Army before Pearl Harbor.” Forgotten indeed! I found the story in this book startling, although I should not have. Like many others, I just assumed that on…
Read More »Lowell’s Matthew Ludvino is a professional filmmaker and editor whose documentary credits as an editor include Year of the Bull and The Man in the Mask. This year, Matt focused some of his considerable talent on creating a film version of one of my Lowell Cemetery tours. In this effort,…
Read More »Former Alaskan poet Laureate Tom Sexton’s latest volume of poetry is “Cummiskey Alley.” The collection is named after Lowell’s first Irishman, Hugh Cummiskey, who walked from Boston to Lowell with a group of Irish laborers. Cummiskey and many other Irish labors dug miles of canals in Lowell, and helped birth…
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