Archive for August 14th, 2012

August 14th, 2012

Lowell Cemetery Tours – Save the Dates

by DickH

Here are the dates for this fall’s tours of Lowell Cemetery:

Friday, September 21, 2012 at 1 pm

Saturday, September 22, 2012 at 10 am

Friday, September 28, 2012 at 1 pm

Saturday, September 29, 2012 at 10 am

All of these tours begin and end at the Knapp Avenue entrance which is just behind Shedd Park. The tours take approximately 90 minutes and involve walking through the cemetery. They take place rain or shine, are free, and require no advance registration.

Last spring’s tours all started at the Lawrence Street Gate and covered that half of the cemetery. In the fall we’ll begin at Knapp Avenue and cover that part. There will be some overlap with what was covered in prior years’ tours but there will also be much that is new. Please save the dates and join us if you can.

CategoryHistory, Lowell | Comment2 Comments »

August 14th, 2012

Mayor Murphy visits City Life

by DickH

There was some compelling local cable TV yesterday. At 6am on City Life hosts John McDonough and George Anthes were visited by their regular every-other-Monday guest, former City Manager and School Committee member Bill Taupier. They ended up with a second, unexpected guest: Mayor Patrick Murphy who arrived at about 7:15 am to confront Taupier about statements made during his previous appearance on July 31. You will recall that at the time, those statements particularly riled Gerry Nutter who in the midst of a blog post entitled “Taupier plays fast and loose with the facts” wrote this:

The comments that got me the most irate were these – He stated the Mayor and Manager received envelopes with letters much earlier than June about the missing money and covered it up! He made that charge and claimed a 2nd time that the Manager was informed ahead of time and John McDonough agreed that he had heard the same thing.

I didn’t see yesterday’s program live but I was able to get a tape of the Mayor’s appearance that I’ll watch sometime soon. The part I did catch began with the Mayor’s departure from the set and the discussion among Taupier and the two hosts that followed.

Two things stood out to me from that portion of the show. One is that Bill Taupier said that the information he shared with viewers on July 31 about the Mayor knowing about the missing money long before it became public (the statement that got both Gerry Nutter and the Mayor so agitated) had been told to him by Rita Mercier. He said that twice. Aside from whether or not it’s true that Rita Mercier was the source of information, it was really amazing to see how casually that Taupier threw her name out as the source of such incendiary information.

The second thing that struck me was Taupier’s repeated statement that “if I said something that offended the mayor, why didn’t he call me” which kind of gets to the heart of a bigger battle going on in Lowell politics today. In the old days, a few self-selected insiders played a slick game of politics, spending hours each day on the phone gossiping like teenagers about the politics of the day. Those calls along with an inside track to what would be “in the paper” were all one needed to be perceived as a power in local politics. All that has changed. I don’t know if the internet and social media are a cause of it or a symptom of it or just tools that are used by people with a different view of how politics work in a changing city. It all reminded me of a scene from the movie Thirteen Days (about the Cuban Missile Crisis) in which Secretary of Defense McNamara chastises the Naval Chief of Staff for refusing to acknowledge or accept the “new language” of crisis diplomacy (the relevant dialogue comes near the end of this 3:45 minute clip but watch the whole thing and see the movie if you haven’t yet).  

CategoryLowell, Politics | Comment3 Comments »

August 14th, 2012

Social Security Act Signed into Law 77 Years Ago ~ August 14, 1935

by Marie

President Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act into law – August 14, 1936.  (Among those at the signing - Frances Perkins, appointed Secretary of Labor in 1933, making her the first woman to hold a cabinet-level position; Senator Robert LaFollette, a progressive Senator from Wisconsin; and Senator Robert Wagner, former Mayor of New York City who introduced the bill.)

 

On this day – August 14, 1935 – President Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act- thus creating one of the most significant government programs in American history. Upon signing the bill, he stated, “We can never insure 100 percent of the population against 100 percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life,  but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-stricken old age.”  According to the U.S. Social Security Administration the act provided “a wide range of programs to meet the nation’s needs… In addition to the program we now think of as Social Security, it included unemployment insurance, old-age assistance, aid to dependent children and grants to the states to provide various forms of medical care.”
A bit of Social Security trivia:
*The first Social Security record was assigned to a 23-year-old New York man, John David Sweeney, Jr.. Ironically, Sweeney died in 1974 at the age of 61 without ever receiving any Social Security benefits. Sweeney’s widow, however, did receive benefits until she died eight years later.
*The first person to receive monthly benefits was Ida May Fuller from Vermont, who retired in November 1939 and started collecting benefits in January 1940 at age 65.  Her first benefit check was for $22.54 and she went on collecting benefits for 35 years, until 1975, when she died at age 100. In this time she collected a total of $22,888.92.
*Concord, New Hampshire, resident Grace D. Owen was issued the first card typed in Concord, which because of the numbering scheme happened to be the card with the lowest possible number — 001-01-0001.
To learn about Social Security today: http://www.ssa.gov/

CategoryHistory, Politics | Comment1 Comment »

August 14th, 2012

Manchester, N.H.

by PaulM

The mill cities along the Merrimack River should promote themselves in clusters like the Civil War sites in the South. Why can’t our region become a multi-day destination for visitors the way heritage sites or natural attractions in other parts of the country present themselves? Manchester, New Hampshire, looks good these days. The downtown has a busy urban feeling on Elm Street. There are more than 30 restaurants of all kinds in about six blocks of mid-town. As in Lowell, you can eat in a different country every night of the week. There’s a free shuttle bus called the Green Dash with pick-ups every ten minutes to encourage activity in the downtown. The Currier Museum of Art, a few blocks from the main street, is one of the best small museums in New England. What the museum leaders did with an expansion project would be worth looking at when we think about the future of the Whistler House Museum of Art and its Parker Gallery. There’s a Franco-American Center and a Science Center with a huge LEGO display in the Amoskeag Millyard District. I can imagine some collaborative programming between Lowell and Manchester. Like the Freedom Trail in Boston, there ought to be something like the Red-Brick Mill Run from Manchester through Nashua, Lowell, and Lawrence, to Haverhill and even Newburyport to catch that piece of the river valley story.

Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, N.H.

 

 

CategoryCulture, Greater Lowell, History, Lowell | Comment2 Comments »

August 14th, 2012

Texas Jack, Peerless Morlacchi and the Lowell Connection

by Tony

Here is another one to place in the category, “there is a Lowell Connection”.

I’m almost through reading a book about Buffalo Bill Cody titled The Colonel and Little Missie written by Larry McCurtry, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel Lonesome Dove. In one of the later chapters McCurtry mentions John Omohundro and Giuseppina Morlacchi.

These two are the Lowell connection.

McCurtry’s book on Buffalo Bill only briefly mentioned that Morlacchi had been buried in Lowell…but I became curious about the “Lowell Connection”…so I googled it. The Center for Lowell History, University of Massachusetts, Lowell served as a great sources of information  regarding Omohundro and Morlacchi. Check it out.

The famous Lowell couple is better known as Texas Jack and Peerless Morlacchi (Josephine). For a number of years Texas Jack performed alongside Buffalo Bill Cody in both his Wild West Show and some independent stage productions. It was during one of these stage shows that Jack met Josephine and they quickly married.

Peerless Morlacchi was one of the most famous dancers in America. Before the marriage, she often performed in Boston, but she didn’t want to live in the city.  The solution? Morlacchi bought a “summer house” in a rural town not far from Boston, Billerica.

While living in Billerica, Morlacchi often visited Lowell and became well known in the Mill City.

 

John Baker Omonhundro (Texas Jack) was a renowned scout for the US Army and considered as able as Buffalo Bill himself. His fame spread rapidly. Texas Jack, like Bill Cody, became the subject of many dime novels.

After their marriage Peerless Morlacchi and Texas Jack continued to tour, but soon grew tired of the road. They purchased a second piece of property in the Merrimack Valley on the corner of Market and Suffolk Streets in Lowell.

No long after, Texas Jack died while on a trip to Colorado. He was only thirty three years old. His wife returned to Billerica and spend her time either in Lowell or “the summer house” in Billerica.

Peerless Morlacchi died in 1886, six years after Texas Jack. She is buried in St Patrick’s Cemetery in Lowell.

CategoryGreater Lowell, History | Comment8 Comments »