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LZ Nunn of the City’s Office of Cultural Affairs and Special Events reports that the art market in Lowell is surprisingly strong even as the Great Recession holds back the economy in general. Lowell has hundreds of artists of all kinds. Each one is a small business even if that’s…
Read More »The Arturo Gatti – Micky Ward fight trilogy took place in 2002 and 2003. On WBUR’s “HubBub” Benjamin Swasey writes today of Lowell fighter Micky Ward and his participation in a long-term study conducted by BU’s Center for the Study of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). Eventually Ward will donate both…
Read More »In the early 1960s, I was following my father’s lead and collecting stamps. I wasn’t obsessive about it, but I enjoyed the hobby for a while, particularly as the stamps were small windows onto history and geography. During the centennial of the Civil War (1961-65), the US Postal Service issued…
Read More »The NYTimes online has an ongoing series about the Civil War, started in anticipation of the 2011 anniversary year when we will see lots of attention being paid to the beginning of the Civil War. This blog has already moved in that direction. Today’s entry at the NYT site is…
Read More »Scene from “Desk Set” – Spencer Tracy/ Katherine Hepburn movie from 1957. As an almost daily viewer of the iconic game show “Jeopardy” – I have mixed feelings about the lastest announcement of upcoming contestants. According to an Associated Press story, two of the best and most successful past champions –…
Read More »Marl Walhberg and Christian Bale on Sports Illustrated Cover From People Magazine about “actors as fighters” from Lowell-made movie “The Fighter” on the cover of Sports Illustrated : Mark Wahlberg not only received glowing reviews for his undertstated performance as the real-life junior welterweight Mickey Ward in The Fighter, but he…
Read More »Come January, 2011 with a reorganization of the Massachusetts Film Office – Executive Director Nick Paleologos will be out of a job. In the new year, the state’s film office will be administered through the state Office of Travel and Tourism. As noted in the Globe earlier this month – the office of Housing…
Read More »Lowell Gallery owner and all around good guy Guy Lefebvre sent me this nugget from an old Lowell newspaper. Some of the party platform planks have flopped and flipped through the years, but the rhetoric remains modern. This is from 1834, when Lowell was still a town, two years before…
Read More »Not too long ago I was doing some research on the original deeds for St Patrick’s Church in Lowell. The initial conveyance was from the Proprietors of the Locks and Canals to a guy named Benedict Fenwick without identifying who Benedict Fenwick was. It turns out he was the Roman…
Read More »Early in the morning of December 13, 1977, a fire broke out on the fourth floor of Aquinas Hall, a woman’s dormitory at Providence College. Within thirty minutes, ten young women were dead – seven from the smoke and flames and three from jumping to escape the inferno. I was…
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