President Obama acceded to General McChrystal’s request to slip back into Afghanistan under an assumed name to say good bye to his staff. Here’s the exclusive video of his return:
June 23rd, 2010
Frank Keefe: “Lowell is a beacon for the rest of the Commonwealth”
The concluding session of the 2010 “Public Matters: Empowering Lowell’s Leaders” program took place this evening at Middlesex Community College. Urban planning guru Frank Keefe (Lowell’s chief city planner a long time ago) was the keynote speaker. I found his remarks fascinating, uplifting and, to anyone interested in Lowell’s developmental trajectory over the past 40 years, invaluable.
Keefe said that when he first got to Lowell, the prevailing “vision of Lowell” was “amorphous and divided” with at least one scenario advocating the demolition of all remaining mill buildings with the resulting rubble used to fill-in the canals. He praised the city council that killed the plan to extend the Lowell Connector through the Back Central Street Neighborhood but said a key event came when Richard Nixon killed funding for Urban Renewal in 1973. Without Federal funds, there was no way to finance the demolition and rebuilding plans.
The turning point within the city came with the establishment of the Centerl City Committee. Up to that point, “the politics of patronage and negativity prevailed” but Central City brought together representatives of every sector of Lowell and forced folks to grapple with a shared vision for the future of the city. That committee decided that Lowell should find its future in its past. Keefe explained that up until that point, historical preservation was all about the colonial era with all available funding going to Federalist buildings and Revolutionary War sites. The notion of spending preservation dollars in a gritty industrial city such as Lowell was unheard of. read more »
June 23rd, 2010
Kerouac ‘On’ Thoreau’s ‘Road’
Speaking of Franco-American Week, in the new New Yorker (June 28) the Talk of the Town section has a piece called “In the Stacks” about a recent display at the New York Public Library. It turns out that librarian Anne Garner specializes in “marginalia,” that is, comments and marks made by authors in books that they’ve read. None other than Jean-Louis Kerouac or John L. Kerouac of Lowell has something on view at the NYPL, which owns the bulk of Kerouac’s papers. Along with Kerouac’s notebooks, typescripts, and other documents, the Kerouac collection includes some books. In this case it is a copy of H. D. Thoreau’s “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” which is way overdue at some library. (According to the New Yorker, K borrowed the book from “a local library in 1949 and never brought it back.”) Ole Memory Babe had a selective memory about such things, I guess. But here’s what’s interesting, in the New Yorker’s words: “On page 227, this sentence—’The traveler must be born again on the road’—was underlined in pencil, with a small, neat check mark beside it.” Is this the smoking literary gun that reveals the origin of the title of Kerouac’s now-classic novel?
My Kerouac scholarship is a little rusty on the roots of “On the Road,” so maybe one of our readers can chime in with more information. I thought I’d found a kind of smoking gun while researching Kerouac’s early influences when I was editing “Atop an Underwood.” One of his heroes as a young writer was Albert Halper of Chicago and New York City. Halper wrote a book of short stories, mostly set in Chicago, titled “On the Shore.” Kerouac was a big fan of stories in that collection. “On the Shore”…”On the Road”…that was close enough for me to call attention to the similarity. But this Thoreau connection is even better. Kerouac admired the Transcendentalists from upriver in Concord. He knew they had walked the Lowell streets and written about the city and rivers here.
Culture, Education, Greater Lowell, History, Lowell | 
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June 23rd, 2010
Franco-American Week Events
We’re halfway through Franco-American Week. Here’s a quick update on remaining events:
Thurs, June 24, 9.15 am—Memorial ceremony at Little Canada Monument, Aiken St, opposite UMass Lowell Recreation Center; 10 am—Flag-raising at Lowell City Hall; 7 pm—Prayer service to honor St. Jean Baptiste at Franco-American School Grotto followed by wine-and-cheese social (bring lawn chairs for outdoor seating)
Saturday, June 26, 6 pm—Musician Josee Vachon at the Lowell Senior Center, Broadway and Fletcher Street (Free admission)
Culture, Education, Greater Lowell, History, Lowell | No Comments »
June 23rd, 2010
Holy Family Hospital Part of the Caritas System
The Globe is reporting today that support for the sale of the Archdiocese of Boston-owned Caritas Christi Healthcare is growing. Local officials, employee unions, the medical community, state representatives, community leaders even retirees are on-board with the sale of the six-hospital non-profit system to Cerberus Capitol Management – a private equity firm. Oversite of this sale falls to Attorney General Martha Coakley – who needs to be convinced that this is the best option for the survival of the healthcare system – and the DPH - that must approve the licensure of any new ownership. The AG and state are in the midst of a series of public hearings that will allow input on the proposal from all stakeholders and concerned parties. For Cerberus – it’s so far – so good – with cautions coming on the questions of the continued Catholic identity of the hospitals and continued healthcare access to certain programs and the possibility of hospital closings. There is some question about the firmness of project ”guarantees.”
Ellen Murphy Meehan, a former Vice-President at Lawrence General Hospital, attended one of the hearings and spoke pointedly for the Health Care Access Coalition:
Ellen Murphy Meehan, coordinator for the Health Care Access Coalition, a group of caregivers in low-income communities, said “a transfer of ownership of a nonprofit system of this size and significance to a for-profit is unprecedented and requires a higher level of scrutiny than any we have seen in Massachusetts ever before.’’
Healthcare in the Merrimack Valley is part of these considerations as the Holy Family Hospital in Methuen – a major area hospital – is part of the Caritas system. As they note on their website: At our 254-bed, not-for-profit Catholic hospital, we serve some 450,000 individuals and their families in 20 communities throughout the Merrimack Valley and southern New Hampshire.
The final hearing on the Caritas-Cerberus proposal will be in Methuen next week. Voice your opinion.
Read the full story by Robert Weisman and Megan Woolhouse here in the Globe.
June 23rd, 2010
General McChrystal’s Fate
The infamous Rolling Stone profile of General Stanley McChrystal is now online. The reports that burst into the public eye yesterday are all true and perhaps a bit understated. The upper echelons of the military are exceedingly political. The image of the non-ideological warrior is a myth; it’s just that some do a better job of covering up their political maneuvering than do others.
The general and his aides are certainly entitled to their opinions (and this article gives full vent to them), but the fact that they would utter them with a reporter in their midst evinces an astonishing lack of judgment. And when they are so lacking in good judgment in this instance, how can we have any confidence of their judgment in others?
One line from the article seems to sum up the general’s fate: “his brashness comes with a price.” I won’t predict what that price will be, but I am asking for your opinion. I’ve created our first-ever user survey. It takes you to my site on Survey Monkey – it’s free, it’s anonymous, and it will take you 10 seconds. Please try it out. Click here to take survey
June 23rd, 2010
‘Support the Books’
Well, if we had a Campaign for Local Literature, I’d propose ‘Support the Books’ as one of the Campaign’s bumper stickers, but we don’t. What the readers of the region can do, though, is show up en masse at the next available local book launching, which happens to be this Friday at 7 p.m. at the Old Court pub at the corner of Middle and Central streets in downtown Lowell. There they will encounter Dave “Coffin Dust” Daniel and Steve “Smokestack Lightning” O’Connor who will do a little stand-up reading of their stories and sit-down book-signing.
June 23rd, 2010
CHS Class of ’51
This video of the Chelmsford High School graduating class of 1951 was put together by Victor and Lynn Ouellett (K1CGl Productions). It contains some great old pictures of Paragon Park at Nantasket Beach and ends with a list of classmates (see if you recognize any names).
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