Tomorrow’s Lowell Walks tour is Major Downtown Fires. The tour will be led by Jason Strunk, a captain of the Lowell Fire Department, the author of “Lowell Firefighting,” and the co-author of “A25: Stories from Lowell’s First Arson Squad.” The tour will visit the sites of some historic fires that…
There’s a major museum exhibition in Paris about the Beat Generation writers this summer. Geoff Dyer, one of the best writers working today, has a piece about the show in The Spectator in England. He gives Jack Kerouac high marks for literary achievement but minces no words about the author…
Please join us this Saturday, July 16, 2016, for the UPPER MERRIMACK STREET Lowell Walk which will be led by Yun-Ju Choi, the Executive Director of Coalition for a Better Acre. The walk begins at 10 a.m. at Lowell National Park Visitor Center at 246 Market St. The walk will…
My father collected stamps most of his life. Below is an item called a First Day Cover, which can be a card or an envelope with a postal cancellation mark on the day the stamp was released to the public. This one is from 1962, the stamp issued in connection…
Following is a list of books I have in play this summer. Some I’ve read through; many others are either partly read or waiting for their time to be picked up. When I wrapped up my management job at UMass Lowell, one of my goals was to re-engage as a…
For the Fourth of July, Independence Day, here’s a poem from the nation’s capital. I wrote this prose poem after a family trip to Washington, D.C., in the summer of 2004. There were John Kerry-for-President signs in the windows. GOP posters for “W,” too. Barack Obama was a figure on…
It’s no secret that I’m a longtime admirer and supporter of Marty Meehan. From Lowell High School days when Marty was sitting in my English class and dashing about as a student leader to later years when after being on opposing sides in a Democratic congressional primary we became work…
Web photo courtesy of Yelp.com Thursday, July 7, 6.00 to 8.00 p.m., at HyperText Bookstore Cafe, 107 Merrimack St. Free and open to all. This program is part of the Downtown First Thursdays arts and business series. Short fiction, long fiction, nonfiction, poetry, the whole literary bag. Writers reading: Walter…
Marie Sweeney was thinking about Catherine Goodwin today and shares the following . . . This photo of Catherine Goodwin in St. Patrick’s Cemetery popped-up in my Facebook feed this morning. With all the Lowell Walks Tours starting and my Saturday morning visit to the Lowell Cemetery for the Art…
From “History of Chelmsford” by Wilson Waters and Henry Spaulding Perham (Courier Citizen, 1917): “… Down as late as 1820, there were caught, mostly at this spot [site of the large mill of the Middlesex Company], and at the foot of Pawtucket falls, twenty-five hundred barrels of salmon, shad, and…