Last Wednesday it was our privilege to be guests at the UMass Lowell 2013 Flag Raising Ceremony & Veterans Day Celebration held outside Cumnock Hall/North Campus. The flag-raising ceremony paid tribute to UMass Lowell’s more than 1,450 student veterans, 2013 Veterans Alumni Hall of Fame inductees and veterans throughout the…
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Through January 20, 2014, in the Gund Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, you can see an outstanding exhibition of watercolor paintings by John Singer Sargent (1856 – 1925), who is best known for his portraits. Rosemary and I spent the morning at the museum yesterday,…
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An excerpt from “The Lighting Up,” an essay in The Prose Works of John Greenleaf Whitter: Volume II (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866). The essay was first published in book form in 1843 in a collection called The Stranger in Lowell, which brought together several essays that had appeared in a…
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Lowell High senior Daniela Deny was the main speaker at the school’s Veteran’s Day program this past Friday. Daniela spoke of her experience last summer in the Normandy Academy program which took her to New Orleans and then France last summer to learn about the invasion of Normandy. She kindly…
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One year after her decisive victory over Scott Brown, Senator Elizabeth Warren invited the most active volunteers from her campaign to a celebration today at the Summer Shack in Cambridge. I asked some of the Lowell volunteers who attended to share their thoughts about this event and about Senator Warren’s…
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City Council Election Tuesday’s city council election is the top story of the week with four new councilors selected to take office in January. The newcomers (and their order of finish) are Dan Rourke (4), Jim Milinazzo (5), Bill Samaras (6), and Corey Belanger (7). They join re-elected incumbents Rita…
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Here are the real estate sales in Lowell for the past week. For several months now, most of the houses being sold fall into one of three categories: (1) the seller has owned the place for decades and presumably has little or no mortgage debt; (2) the property is being…
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Tony Sampas took this photo of the underside of the old Memorial Bridge (aka “University Ave Bridge”) in the foreground with the underside of the new bridge (which is to be named the “Richard P. Howe Bridge” for my father) in the background. I understand that the new bridge is…
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Today’s Guardian online in the UK has a long piece by David Runciman in which he digs deeply into the ways a democratic system of government can be exasperating to its citizens. But, as others have said, Consider the alternatives. Here’s the essay. The insights here apply to the system down…
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Hanging on a nearby wall is the framed original of my great grandfather’s naturalization papers. Covering the front of the document are fading red stamps that say “Registrars of Voters, Lowell MA” with a succession of changing dates beginning with “Oct 15 1900.” Like most of his fellow immigrants from…
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