On Saturday, May 20, 2023, Lowell Cemetery will host a Veterans Tour of the cemetery to recognize and remember those who served in the military forces of the United States. Rather than a standard tour led by a single guide, this tour will have volunteer guides positioned at each of…
Important Life Lesson By Charles Gargiulo My Mom decided to send me to a Catholic high school after I graduated from my Catholic elementary school. I don’t know why it was such a big deal to her since she never went to church and I never did either, but it…
Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the collapse of New Hampshire’s Old Man of the Mountain. The Old Man of the Mountain was a natural rock formation located in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, USA. It was a series of five granite cliff ledges that appeared to form the…
Back on April 16, 2016, in the aftermath of the Lowell City Council vote to revoke the invitation extended to General Hun Manet of the Cambodian Army (and the son of Prime Minister Hun Sen), I wrote the following post that gave a brief overview of Cambodian history. With…
Review of Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life, by Elizabeth D. Leonard Review by Richard Howe Scrolling through a list of books about Lowell’s Civil War General Benjamin Butler discloses a number of unflattering titles including The South Called Him Beast, When the Devil Came Down to Dixie, Army…
I suppose you could pick any day of the year and find many important things that happened through the years on that day. Perhaps because April 19 has local significance due to the 1775 battles at Lexington and Concord, and the 1861 riot involving soldiers from Lowell at the start…
Laid Off By Paul Marion The following story by Paul Marion originally appeared on paulmarion.com with the title, “Laid Off,” a chapter from “Do You Think You’ll Ever Go Back?” (a memory book in progress). ONE OF MY PRE-SCHOOL MEMORIES is a composite of scenes with my father during the…
While scrolling through the Netflix home page recently, I came upon Notre-Dame, a series produced in France which was “inspired by true accounts from French firefighters” who helped save the historic cathedral from complete destruction in the 2019 fire. While the fire is the through-line of the six-episode series with…
The United States Veterans Administration (VA) celebrated Women’s History Month with a blog post highlighting women who led the fight for better health care for women veterans. One of those recognized was Edith Nourse Rogers, who represented Lowell in Congress for 35 years until her death in 1960. Below is…
The bitter cold we endured this weekend brought to mind other weather extremes. For me, the Blizzard of ’78, which struck on February 5, 1978, has always been tops in that category. I lived through it as a 19-year-old student at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island. As bad as…