“On the Road” goes to an iTunes app. If you are into Kerouac, check this out.
June 19th, 2011
Lowell Cultural Summit: Chris Isaak, Pat Mogan, & Amy Black
Thanks to Amy Black on Facebook for this historic image that I hope she doesn’t mind us sharing here—this is inside the Patrick J. Mogan Cultural Center, which has a front lawn in the form of Boarding House Park where Amy and Chris performed masterfully last night to open the 2011 Lowell Summer Music Series. That’s Pat Mogan, “Father of the Park,” in the permanent bronze. By the way, Pat is still around and giving homework assignments to some of us.
Chris Isaak, Patrick J. Mogan, and Amy Black (web photo courtesy of www.amyblack.com )
June 19th, 2011
‘Milky Way’
Milky Way
.
Wind gusts. Lamps flicker.
If there’s a power cut, we’ll sit and talk about the storm,
sure the villa will hold up, then rise in the light of our Sun.
The other stars can’t help us, their faint points beautiful but useless
except for how they hold the whole together.
My father would have liked this island; he was thin and always cold.
He loved sunshine, especially as an older man
when he was even skinnier and back working in “the barn,”
as he called the wool scouring mill in New England.
He’d been happy in California for a few big-payday seasons in the 1960s,
touring sheep spreads up and down the Great Central Valley.
My body runs hot. Friends laughed about my “hockey blood”
when I swore a sweatshirt was enough on the black-ice pond.
On one of his last days, dying of cancer, Dad reached out from his hospital bed
and wrapped his big bony hands around my forearm as if it was a heater.
“In the disk of our galaxy, stars form and die in a calm fashion,
like burning embers in a campfire,” says an expert, “but in a starburst galaxy,
star birth and death are like explosions in a fireworks factory.”
One thousand starlets light the Orion Nebula,
some of which lack mighty cauldrons that yield a Sun or more.
Those are the brown dwarfs.
And in that particle mix one matchless star pumps hydrogen
to fuel a thousand teeming solar systems.
.
Paul Marion (c) 2002
St. Lucia
June 19th, 2011
Farewell, Clarence Clemons
June 19th, 2011
Celebrating the B’s and Making a Lowell Connection
In today’s Globe writer Eric Moskowitz tells us about his out and about coverage of fan reaction to the Bruins Stanley Cup victory. His wanderings around Canal Street led him to an exhibit at the West End Museum, a gallery on Staniford Street. His discovery of the origin of Canal and Causeway Streets as the terminus for what many call the “nation’s first great canal” is what makes the Lowell connection. Here’s a bit of its history:
The Middlesex, a hand-dug, 27-mile waterway completed in 1803, was “Boston’s First Big Dig,’’ as organizers from the Middlesex Canal Association and the museum call it.
The canal linked Boston to the Merrimack River and what is now Lowell, opening the seaport to inland trade and facilitating the Industrial Revolution; its success encouraged the start of the Erie Canal. It also helped build Boston, ferrying the granite used to construct the first Massachusetts General Hospital building and other landmarks.
The canal was financed by a corporation formed in 1793 by James Sullivan, the future governor for whom Sullivan Square is named. It was enabled by an act of the Legislature and completed under Loammi Baldwin, the Revolutionary War colonel regarded as the father of American civil engineering.
The canal initially ended near what is now Bunker Hill Community College, where the Charles River met Boston Harbor. Baldwin concocted a cable tow to pull less-than-seaworthy canal barges across the open water. On the other side, the area around today’s Garden was flooded, except for a narrow berm topped by a causeway (now Causeway Street) separating the open water from what was known as Mill Pond.
Read the full article here at Boston.com and find out much more on the website of the Middlesex Canal Association – better yet – take a trip to Billerica and visit the Middlesex Canal Museum and Visitors Center.
Current Events, Greater Lowell, History, Lowell | 
No Comments »
Recent Comments