This recent SUN story by Dennis Shaughnessey is about my uncle Tom, Thomas Brady. Somehow I missed it in the paper on Wednesday, but my brother mentioned it tonight, so I looked it up. We had a crowd of first cousins when I was growing up, and all the uncles…
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A selection of the letters exchanged by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg between 1944 and 1963 has been published by Viking Penguin. Bill Morgan, long associated with Ginsberg, and David Stanford, who worked on Kerouac projects at Viking (he was my editor at Viking for “Atop an Underwood,” too), co-edited…
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In the Globe today there’s an article by James Sullivan about a new book whose author was fascinated by baseball cards while growing up in Vermont in the ’70s. The title of the book is “Cardboard Gods.” I was a big baseball card collector as a kid and into the…
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Tomorrow morning (Saturday, June 12, 2010) at 10 am, I’ll be leading a tour of historic Lowell Cemetery. We start at the Knapp Avenue gate which is right next to Shedd Park. There’s no charge and the tour takes about 90 minutes. Please consider joining us.
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One of my favorite names of “lost” places or businesses in Lowell is Sweetland Garden. I never went there, but I remember the name from my youth. I’ve heard people talk about it. I think Nancye Tuttle of the SUN years ago wrote a story about the teenagers who used…
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Give the Woodstock chant, “No rain, no rain, no rain,” for RiverFest tomorrow. Events start at 12 noon with the ribbon-cutting for the Concord River Greenway Park behind the Davidson Parking Lot opposite Lowell Memorial Auditorium. Activities include bluegrass, soul, rock, and other kinds of music; kids stuff like crafts…
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Poet Tom Sexton has a new book due next March: “I Think Again of Those Ancient Chinese Poets.” The publisher is University of Alaska Press. Watch for Tom to be in the area next spring for a reading or two.
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Bob Gagnon, chair of the Lowell Flood Owners Group in Pawtucketville, wrote a letter to the SUN that was published yesterday. In it he included the address to which people with comments about the proposed “bladder dam” at Pawtucket Falls can send letters: Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs, 100…
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Earlier this week I traveled to the Massachusetts State Archives to assist an acquaintance from the West Coast in his Civil War research. The Archives is located at Columbia Point in Boston, next to the JFK Library and not far from the UMass Boston Campus. While I’d been there before,…
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Lowell – the Mill Town of the 1940’s – is the star of Tracy Winn’s collection of short stories – Mrs. Somebody Somebody. The trials and tribulations of an assortment of characters from many of Lowell neighborhoods have lives that interconnect and thus tell us a story. As noted in Booklist: Over time, through the…
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