Archive for June 8th, 2012

June 8th, 2012

Conviction in text-driving killing should be a wake-up call by Marjorie Arons-Barron

by Tony

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

Aaron Deveau was only 17 when he crossed the center line while texting and killed Daniel Bowley, Jr. of New Hampshire, the father of three grown children. Deveau, now 18 years old, is the first person to be convicted under a law making it a crime to injure someone while texting. Even without the specific texting ban, the tragedy would still look like vehicular homicide, or at least manslaughter. But the horror, for the irresponsible, thoughtless youth and his family, no less than for the family and friends of the victim, should drive home the unspeakable danger of texting while driving.

AP photo

On the day of the collision, Deveau had exchanged 193 texts, two of them in the two minutes before the crash. On the stand, he still denied he had been texting, saying he was preoccupied by homework and swerved to avoid a car in front that had slowed down. According to ABC News, drivers who text are 23 times more likely to get into a crash than those who are not. Clearly Deveau was inviting trouble, and he got it.

There are lessons here for both texters and cell phone users. The state’s Safe Driving Law now bans texting by anyone and cell phone use by drivers under 18. I don’t have statistics on the regularity of police enforcement of the ban, but, whatever the numbers, monitoring should be more aggressive. And the law needs beefing up. We have all seen adults distracted by cell phone use. I’d like to have a dollar for every driver whose arm, elbow propped on the car door, is holding phone to ear, blocking the view of anything to his or her left. A near miss is another way of saying near collision. The legislature should follow the lead of California and nine other states and amend the Safe Driving Act to ban handheld cell phones.

Tighter rules and better enforcement going forward won’t bring back Daniel Bowley, Jr. or salvage a normal life for Aaron Deveau. He was sentenced to 2 and 1/2 years of a possible four. He’s going to do a year in jail, and he’ll have to do community service when he gets out on probation for the the remainder of his term. Plus, he won’t be allowed to drive for 15 years. He’ll have to live with this for the rest of his life.

Part of Deveau’s community service should be to go into high school classrooms and talk about his experience, about the need to obey the law and drive attentively, and about how you can ruin your life and those of others by indifference to the law and ignoring the rules of common sense. He should have to show the picture of the person he killed to drive home the point.

CategoryUncategorized | CommentNo Comments »

June 8th, 2012

The Catholic Church in Lowell

by DickH

Lowell has many churches. Several of the Roman Catholic edifices have the architectural beauty of some of the finest of European cathedrals, and the clergy shepherd their flocks carefully. from George Kenngott, “The Record of a City”

Thus wrote George Kenngott in his 1912 book “The Record of a City: A Social Survey of Lowell Massachusetts.” The book is packed with important information about the city of Lowell as it was exactly one hundred years ago which helps you get past the often cringe-inducing racial and ethnic observations that were presumably mainstream thought of the day. While Kenngott’s focus was not the religious practices of the city’s residents, he does provide a snapshot of the community’s religious institutions. For the Roman Catholic religion, he counted 13 churches “including five French, one Portuguese and two Polish.”

I mention Kenngott’s observations of one hundred years ago because of an article in yesterday’s Globe North section regarding a new proposal that would “group” the city’s Catholic parishes together or with other parishes outside the city. While this development would be of interest to residents who are active in these parishes, it should also be noted by anyone interested in the city’s history because the various Roman Catholic parishes, through the years, were central to the identity of a majority of residents. That’s largely changed now, but it’s still a vital part of our history. Plus, this present grouping of some of the surviving Lowell parishes with those in adjoining towns reflects the migration of Catholics from the city to the suburbs.

With that, here are the proposed groupings (all parishes are in Lowell unless otherwise noted):

  • St Francis Assisi (Dracut) with St Michael
  • St Marguerite D’Youville (Dracut) and St Mary Magdalen (Tyngsborough) and St Rita
  • St Anne (Littleton) and St Catherine of Alexandria (Westford)
  • St Anthony, Holy Trinity and Immaculate Conception
  • St Margaret and Holy Family and St Patrick

That’s a long way from the 13 Roman Catholic Churches counted by George Kenngott back in 1912

CategoryGreater Lowell, History, Lowell | Comment6 Comments »

June 8th, 2012

Lowell Then: Model Cities Program (1968-72)

by PaulM

From 1968 to 1972, Lowell participated in a new urban redevelopment program that had been launched as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” legislative broadside. The federal programs were intended to lift up the many Americans facing dire economic and social challenges. Lowell Mayor Edward J. Early, Jr., moved to explore the new source of funding at the behest of Lowell City Councilor George F. O’Meara, a long-time supporter of the Kennedy political clan in Massachusetts with contacts in the Johnson administration. The mayor appointed a committee to follow up: city planner Jack Tavares, John Mahoney of Community Teamwork Inc., George Flanagan of the Lowell Housing Authority, William Kealy of the Lowell Redevelopment Authority, and Patrick J. Mogan, then assistant superintendent of the Lowell School Department.

Parts of Lowell ranked high on the “misery index” in that period, but there were some inventive development plans being put forward by community activists. The city easily qualified in the first round of funding. By 1973, the local Model Cities group had made progress with initiatives in public safety, housing, education, culture, recreation, health care, elder and youth services, neighborhood infrastructure, traffic, information networks, and environmental quality–75 programs, small and large, aimed at improving day to day life, primarily in the Acre neighborhood. In a report published in 1972, the Lowell Model Cities leadership expressed its progressive theory of urban living.

Through the centuries, man’s basic needs have been intimately tied to the happiness and fulfillment he seeks from life. The complexities of present-day urban environments haven’t changed this, for our aspirations are, in essence, as timeless as the natural cycle of birth and death. We seek adequate food and shelter. Outlets for our skills and our inborn creative talents. Health. Safety. Stimuli for learning and self-expression. The presence of open space—of sky above us, grass at our feet, and sunshine’s warm embrace. Because we are interrelating creatures, we also seek the companionship, compassion, and understanding of our fellow human beings. The fundamental reason for a city’s existence is to foster those human values.

(Thanks to Gray Fitzsimons and Mehmed Ali for their diligent research on Lowell’s recent past, which helped inform this nugget of history.) 

CategoryHistory, Lowell | CommentNo Comments »

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