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Orphaned at a young age, James C. Ayer became a global leader in the 19th century pharmaceutical industry. His medicine plant on Middle Street in Lowell employed 300 workers and his ubiquitous trading cards and almanacs remain favorite artifacts for collectors today. Diversifying his fortune, Ayer invested in textile mill ownership. Later in life, he turned to philanthropy, donating a magnificent statue (Winged Victory) to Lowell and money to a new town (which called itself Ayer in his honor). When Ayer died in 1878, his family commissioned Irish-born artist Albert Bruce-Joy to sculpt a 25-ton lion from Italian marble to mark Ayer’s grave in Lowell Cemetery. —RPH
Mission
The Lowell Review brings together writers and readers in the Merrimack River watershed of eastern New England with people everywhere who share their curiosity about and passion for the small and large matters of life. Each issue includes essays, poems, stories, criticism, opinion, and visual art.
In the spirit of The Dial magazine of Massachusetts, edited by Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 1840s, The Lowell Review offers a space for creative and intellectual expression. The Dial sought to provide evidence of “what state of life and growth is now arrived and arriving.”
This publication springs from the RichardHowe.com blog, known for its “Voices from Lowell and beyond.” In America, the name Lowell stands out, associated with industrial innovation, working people, cultural pluralism, and some of the country’s literary greats.
Doug Holder • Elegant and Eternal.....................................................................................
Paul Ilechko • The Polish Uncle
Tom Laughlin • Outside Boston University’s Agganis Arena with Those Who Couldn’t Get
Tickets to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, Ninety-Fourth Birthday Address, January 15th, 2023 74
Matt W. Miller • On Seeing Wang Hui’s Clearing after Rain over Streams and Mountains ....
Lucy Larcom • The Distant Mountain Range ......................................................................
Helena Minton • At Collins Pond
Dave Robinson • Oona, Moving to Sao Luis........................................................................80
Jim Provencher • Spring Training Winter Haven
Chath pierSath • First Rain ...............................................................................................
Ma Yongbo • Two Poems ...................................................................................................
Jeanne Schinto • The Missionary Factory (an excerpt) .......................................................
William C. Crawford • “I Hear You Lima Charlie—How Me?”: A Lost Radio Transmission
Nell
Nell Lasch • The Veteran ..................................................................................................
Chaz Scoggins • Welcome to Witassic
Malcolm Sharps • The Elusive Nature of British Punk ........................................................
Dancing at Holy Ghost Park
SUSAN APRIL
Can’t dance. Never could. First school dance, September 1969, I tried. Thank God, the lights in the gym were dim. Every boy who asked me ended up shuffling over to a different dance partner, leaving me alone. What was wrong? Were my elbows too jerky? Did my feet trip over themselves? If I had been high, I might not have minded as much, but cold sober I was deathly aware that I couldn’t dance. Even to a nothing band in nowhere Dracut. So I parked myself, like some abandoned lemon of a car, along the back wall under a raised-up basketball hoop, wooden climbing bars, and the red fire alarm.
New Year’s Resolution, January 1970: learn to dance. Plan A: watch American Bandstand, Saturdays, at one o’clock: “Hi, this is Dick Clark and this is American Bandstand.” The moves looked simple enough. Plan B: get a step chart. But the library only offered the chacha and old-time ballroom dances. Also, could a chart teach me how to keep the beat? I only had Plan A.
Arms: boys’ arms swayed in an easygoing way, not wildly like in the Jerk or the Swim. Those were ‘60s dances. Hips: boys did not move them so much, but the girls’ hips swayed something fierce. I noticed another thing: they seemed to move in an opposite way—hips right, arms left. Legs: I never figured out how legs were supposed to move.
The girls wore short, tight skirts. If not a tight skirt, then a flitty mini-dress. Flitty enough that at times you could see the tops of their panty hose. Not the waistband top, but the part where the nude nylon upper thigh meets the darker-toned panty. This seemed significant.
So I bought such a dress. Must have stolen the money, but perhaps it was from babysitting. Who knows?
The dress whispered to me from the misses rack, third floor, Bon Marché in Lowell. It was pale blue—the color of the Hope Diamond—and made of velvet. Man, did that dress flit! It had a dropped waist with an extra curvy bottom that resembled an ice skater skirt. When I tried it on in the dressing room, it swished like a breeze even when I stood still. Dress practically danced by itself.
*
Cumnock Hall. Lowell Tech. Spring, 1970. Could have been a Valentine’s Dance or a Spring Mixer. Bring your sweetheart. I was fourteen. I still couldn’t dance, but now I owned the hottest, ice-blue dress ever sewn by human hands. I didn’t need a sweetheart. If I couldn’t dance, the boys wouldn’t mind. At least, that was my thinking.
You had to buy a ticket. Was a dollar. Must have had a dollar because I got in. This was no high school gym. Place was huge and crowded. Could hold 800. At least, that’s how many it held during the Greater Lowell Spelling Bees which were always held there and for
which I never qualified.
At this dance, I knew no one. Didn’t think that’d be a problem. In fact, was an advantage. No one would guess I was fourteen and a high school freshman. Because: the dress. So I walked around the dance floor with flounce and hope. Around and around. But nobody asked me to dance. Because: college kids, for the most part. With dates. Bring a sweetheart.
Perhaps I did look fourteen.
I walked so much I got sweaty. Passed a table lined with red and white Coke cups where older people—professors? chaperones?—were taking money. But I had no money. That dollar was it. I was killer thirsty and went in search of a bubbler. Found an odd, circa. 1950, white porcelain fountain, just outside the bathrooms. Looked harmless enough. If you pressed the handlebar, water would—or should—bubble up gently from the water spigot. Then you could drink.
But no.
When I pressed it, a burst of water shot up into my face, my eyes, and all over the front of my blue velvet dress. A guy in a tweed coat with leather buttons laughed. His name had to be Farnum J. Pollard, Jr. or something. He was leaning on a wall with a red and white Coke cup in his hand. He didn’t offer me his initialed handkerchief or ask if I was all right. I stood there dripping as his date emerged from the ladies. She wore a bell-sleeve, sheath dress in ivory, and looked the spitting image of Ali McGraw. They walked off laughing. I had a coat. Somewhere. Had to find it and escape this dancing disaster. Did I lay it down on a chair somewhere? What chair? Which wall? I ran around for a long time looking for it and not a single person asked, “Are you okay? Can I help you find something? Are you lost?”
Did they always have fourteen-year-olds in silly wet dresses tripping over chairs and almost in tears? Was I invisible? I felt stupid. And so alone.
According to Google Maps, it’s a 56-minute, 2.8 mile walk, from Cumnock Hall to Collinsville Center in Dracut where I lived. On Saturday, February 14th, 1970, the temperature was, according to weatherspark.com, between freezing and very cold. It was dark—that I remember.
Coat or no coat, I walked home.
Never wore that dress again.
Gave up watching American Bandstand
Started to drink.
Didn’t buy the alcohol myself. But my friend Debbie D. did. Seemed she had a hundred ways to obtain it. I simply followed along. One scheme worked like this: Debbie would call Muldoon Liquors claiming to be her mother. I think Muldoon’s went by a different name at the time. Muldoon’s—or whatever it was called—was a package store that delivered.
Mrs. D. (aka Debbie) was having a party. She placed the order over the phone. She’d say deliver it by four o’clock. She’d tell them she’d likely be in the shower then and to set the boxes of booze in the kitchen. She’d leave the door unlocked. The money would be on the table.
When the car came up the drive, we’d go hide in the bathroom and run the shower. Good for a month’s worth of vodka.
Debbie’s father was Belgian. Her mother was Polish. Later, when Debbie got caught at
something—I think involving hard drugs—and had to go into rehab, Mrs. D. (the real one) took me under her wing. I no longer was drinking because I had none of Debbie’s chutzpah.
As her stand-in daughter, Mrs. D. taught me how to make chrusciki—Polish bow ties or angel wings. They were heavenly sweet and crunchy-delicious. Also, I began to work at the family’s Fish and Chip market. Open only on Fridays. Best haddock in Lowell, bar none.
After I’d mastered chrusciki, Mrs. D. decided I should learn how to polka. She dragged me to weddings, summer festivals, battles of the polka bands. I tried. I really tried. But I can’t dance. Never could.
Polkas involve moving in circles around the dance floor while jumbling up and down with a stomach full of food and liquids. My partners—had Mrs. D. paid them?—were nice enough. They ignored my two left feet and green sea-sick look. They literally carried me around on the dance floor. Polkas are odd. You bump into people and they don’t scowl. They like it. They smile and the man slaps you on the rump and says something in Polish. I’d smile back. What else could I do?
So I bounced and bopped and met other people’s butts. Still, I couldn’t polka. Then, before I knew it, Debbie was out of rehab. She was a new person—no drinking, no drugs. A dutiful daughter. Had a boyfriend, too. Met him in rehab. She took over my spot at the fish market.
I was no longer needed.
*
My friend Moe. She was the leader of a new group of friends I’d begun to hang with. Girls from the all-girls parochial high school where my parents sent me after I let my grades slip in public school. By slip, I mean tried to turn a report card of Fs into Ds by tracing a D over the red F and whiting out the F’s small middle bar. Wish I’d kept that card. What a laugh.
Dracut High was out. Keith Hall was in. Nuns. Mass in the chapel on holy days. But here’s something: Catholic girls can be wild. Soon as school let out, the pleated uniform skirt got stepped out of, rolled into a ball, and kicked into our lockers. Out came the faded blue, bell-bottom jeans. They weren’t bought faded—we had to wash and bleach them until they were right. If the fabric wore out in a spot, we’d patch it with calico. And the hems had to be frayed. We used manicure scissors and tweezers to do that. My special touch was the circle of cigarette holes I burnt into the bell bottom part, then embroidered with yellow thread: voila! daisies.
The bottom of my jeans was a field of daisies.
We wore Dr. Scholl’s wooden sandals or Jesus sandals of braided leather.
Our purses were fringed.
We wore brown burnished leather belts with brass buckles.
We smoked Marlboros.
Moe showed up with a pack of Gauloises Brunes Non Filters once. I tried, but couldn’t finish one.
We smoked pot.
We hitchhiked to Hampton Beach.
We took the train to Boston and hung out on the Common. We panhandled and took in a decent amount of change.
Still, I managed to get straight A’s. Because I liked my new Lowell friends. And I really
liked Moe.
Moe. Her real name was Maureen, but she hated that. Her last name was Neves.
“That’s an unusual last name,” I said.
“It’s Portuguese,” she said.
“Oh, like near Spain?”
“Christ, no. We’re from Madeira. All the Portuguese in Lowell are from the Azores or Madeira. Don’t you know that? They’re islands. In the Atlantic. Off the coast of Africa.”
I didn’t. I found it fascinating that Moe came from a far away island—so pirate-like and romantic. I’d bug her to tell me about the island of Madeira, but she’d shrug me off and light up a joint. “God, Susan, you’re so—” She wouldn’t finish the sentence, but blow a circle of smoke into the air. Moe was the only girl I knew who could blow smoke circles.
“If you’re so fascinated,” she said out of the blue one day, “you should come with me to Holy Ghost Park.”
“Where’s that?”
“What? Holy Ghost? Haven’t you ever been to the Stadium?”
“Lowell Stadium where they play football?”
“Yes. Holy Ghost Park is right there.”
“Never knew that. When can we go?”
“I’ll have to ask my dad when’s the next festival. Got to go there during a festival. Otherwise, it’s boring as sin.”
Moe blew a series of smoke circles that rose to the ceiling of her room. Her room! I’d never seen such a filled-with-nifty-stuff place. Candles in wine bottles. Beaded curtains. Dolls from every country. Books on shelves. Hard-covered ones, too, not cheap paperbacks with their front covers torn off like I had to buy at Harvey’s comics-and-X-rated-magazine store.
Moe was an only child. I was one of six.
Moe wore gauzy, plunging neckline, peasant blouses with a bib-style chain mail necklace. She wore make-up and had turquoise rings. Also opals and black onyx. A ring for each finger.
She was a pirate.
I think I was in love with her.
*
Labor Day weekend, 1971. Moe called me on the phone. I hadn’t seen much of the gang from Keith that summer. Some of us had jobs or got stuck with family crap like babysitting younger sibs. Some of us lived out in the sticks of Dracut.
But Moe had not forgotten me.
“After the Loreto procession this Saturday, there’s a festival at Holy Ghost Park. Want to come?”
Of course. Who could miss that?
“What’s a Loreto procession?” I asked.
Although she was on the phone, I swear I saw smoke rings.
“Just trust me. It’ll be fun.”
Don’t remember how I got there. Didn’t walk. That was too far, even for me. No bus route. Hitchhike? Ask Dad to drive me? I’m puzzled by how I got around before I had my license and a car. Teleportation?
I showed up at 8 p.m. on the dot. The sun was thinking about setting. The place was all lit up with patio lights and sparkly banners. Smoke filled the park. I couldn’t figure why until I saw the line of barbecue grills and smokers. There was a small stage and lots of park benches.
“Olá, Susan. Quanto tempo!” Moe waved to me from the stage area.
“What are you saying?” I cocked my head as I walked towards her.
“It’s Portuguese. You have to speak it a little or the old ladies will slap you with a program. Just say, Olá. Means hello.”
I turned to a nearby group of ladies in flowery dresses, “Olá. Olá.” I said.
“Don’t overdo it,” Moe laughed.
“And the rest—what you said?”
“Quanto tempo. Means long time no see or how are you?”
Moe took me aside. “Listen, after the queen and her court arrives and the dancing starts, it’ll get a bit wild out here.”
I froze. Dancing?
When I say froze, I mean I turned into a tree trunk, my feet became roots, my arms, broken branches about to fall.
“Girl, what is wrong with you?” Moe held my elbow with concern.
“You. Said. Dancing.” I managed to voice.
“Um, yea. What’d you think was going to happen at a Portuguese festival? This is a dance floor.” She pointed to a fifty foot square of asphalt, surrounded by patio lights on poles. “We eat smoked meat, drink wine—it’s okay, even the little kids drink some—and we dance.”
I did not faint because I was a tree. But if a strong wind had come up, I might have pitched over.
“Do you want to sit down?” Moe looked around for an empty bench.
“Não, não quero.” I spoke in perfect Portuguese.
“That’s the damnedest thing,” Moe said. “I thought you didn’t know the language?”
I didn’t. I don’t.
I’ve never been able to explain how that one night, at Holy Ghost Park in Lowell, Massachusetts, I transformed.
Spoke in tongues.
Danced—with the beat and no stepped-on toes.
Ate morcela and smoked eels.
Drank something that might have been wine but tasted like tangerines.
Moe said she never saw me so—lively.
We took a break from dancing and walked over to the dark of the football stadium where we smoked our cigarettes. We talked about our families. How different they were. Yet how the same.
Moe grew quiet, then confessed: “I had an older sister once.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Well, she went to New York City. Told no one. Next thing a call comes to our house. She’s dead in a hotel room. She’d hung herself. My family kept it all hush-hush. It was awful.”
“Oh my God. I’m so sorry.”
“My parents won’t talk about her. Won’t let me—or anyone—say her name.”
Moe blew smoke circles that traveled up through the bleachers. I wondered if it was true, any of it—Madeira, dead sisters, opals, pirate jewelry—but as Moe talked and smoked, I felt a spirit enter me, gentle like snow.
We went back to the dance, but our world had changed. I was fifteen.
*
Donny Osmond’s “Go Away Little Girl” charted number one in the Top Forty that September for three weeks in a row.
I didn’t care. I was into the Moody Blues. The Who. The Doors, even though Jim Morrison had died. Pop music was for kids. Dancing, for kids.
That special day at Holy Ghost Park was my last dance. Never tried again. Even at Senior Prom. Especially at Senior Prom.
Moe and her date sat at our table at Senior Prom. She looked magnificent. He looked like a twerp. The band played “Color My World.” Over and over again. Maureen Sayer—who went by Maureen and not Moe—also sat at our table. She had a wicked infectious laugh. We girls laughed all night. Moe smuggled in booze we added to the table’s non-alcohol champagne. We were ourselves. For one last time. Even with scowling boyfriends by our side.
Then we graduated. Life comes at you fast. I never saw Moe, Maureen, or most of the old Keith Hall gang again.
I recently stumbled across Moe’s obituary. Ashamed I hadn’t kept in touch. Now too late. “She proudly declared herself an old hippie, always believing in peace and love and wanting to share goodness with the world,” read the obit. Also this: “She was the only child of the late John Neves.”
Well, I believe there was another: Moe’s older sister. The ghost of whom may have entered my body one smoky summer evening, so long ago.
Neves in Portuguese means snow. I hope Moe and her sister are together again. In a field of daisies or a circle of snow.
A March in Lowell
MICHAEL ANSARA
The Lowell police station seems particularly small this spring evening. The police break out a few shotguns to bring to the front. Outside waves of young people, hopped up on speed, acid and booze, bay for blood, every ten or fifteen-minutes breaking on the steps of the station.
Repeatedly the cops sally out into the crowd, freely swinging their clubs, determined to deter the kids from storming the police station. Amy and I sit rigidly alert on the hard, wooden visitors’ benches somewhat relieved, but enormously uncomfortable and embarrassed. The front sitting area bustles with cops coming and going. Soon a noisy group of clean-shaven close-cropped men, thick-waisted and wide-shouldered, come through the door laughing, backslapping, enjoying every moment. After a quick double take upon seeing us, they start in with gleeful banter: “What you doing here? Hey, is that your wife? Hmm . . . Jack, does that look like the woman we saw Mike with last time? Nope, totally different. Hey last time I was on him he was with some babe of a blond . . . Really at MIT I saw him with a gorgeous red head…. Which is his real wife . . . Hey Mike, I saw all the gang tonight. What a night. Ira and Miles and Moofy, Josh, Debbie, and Danny and . . .” making manifest that they know every organizer I work with. These are the State Police assigned to the anti-war movement and radicals--what we call the “red squad.” Police drag in a kid from the crowds on the streets. As we sit in the waiting room, silent, embarrassed, we hear the cops work over the kid in the back, hear the impact of fists, boots, Billy clubs, the angry yells of pain, rage, rebellion. And we sit there, attempting to make sense of what has happened. Sit there as “dangerous radicals” purposefully remaining in that police station. Sit there because originally those mobs of kids outside now fighting police and threatening to storm the station had been howling for our blood. *
There are the occasional epiphanies: moments of sudden clarity, sometimes revealing truths that should have been blindingly obvious. My road to Damascus ran straight through Lowell in the spring of 1970.
The organizing group in Lowell was led by Ira Arlook. Handsome, small, intense, persuasive, Ira had been an anti-war leader at Stanford. He then moved to Boston and became an organizer of draft resistance. I grew increasingly close to him and thought of him as one of our best organizers and strategists. Neither of us had the slightest interest in any of the sectarian craziness that tore SDS to shreds. When Ira moved to Lowell to lead a small organizing group, I had little doubt that there would soon be a thriving communitybased anti-war organization there. Indeed, the Lowell organizers steadily built a base of committed activists and many more supporters.
By 1970, Lowell was a hollow shell of the vibrant mill town that brought the industrial revolution to North America and then sustained a strong textile industry for 100 years. The massive brick mill buildings, beautiful and mighty, stood vacant, stripped of the machinery that had been moved to the American South before continuing on to Central America and Asia. The economy sagged, then cratered. Unemployment soared to 12 percent. The population was falling, the city failing. Neglect clawed the streets, the closed mill buildings, the boarded storefronts. Only the bars and taverns were full at ten in the morning and ten at night.
By the late sixties, the streets of Lowell would still be filled with young people even as they longed to leave. Downtown was no longer vibrant, but it would be jammed especially on Thursday—pay day, shopping night, drug buying night. The culture was its own form of wild west; young men challenging each other for no reason, for every reason, for the slightest reason, to fist fights on street corners, at gas stations, outside bars, inside bars. The Golden Gloves regional boxing tournament was the annual talk of the town. Youth culture, few jobs, angry music, and a rolling river of despair powered a thriving drug market that was visible on downtown Market Street once the sun set. On a Thursday night, Ira and his team would be out on Market Street, talking with the long-haired, bell-bottomed men and the young women in their miniskirts and short shorts. It was never hard to start up a conversation about the war.
“What you think of the war in Vietnam?”
“Oh man, it sucks. Everyone knows that.”
“Any friends over there?”
“Yeah, my cousin’s a marine in Nam right now.”
“We’re working to get him home before he gets killed,” the organizer would tell them. “The politicians and the generals don’t care about your cousin; they don’t care about the guys who get drafted. You know it’s not their sons over there. It’s the guys from Lowell who are cannon fodder.”
Soon enough there would be a tight knot of young people intensely debating, most with serious faces, some stoned. Sometimes it would be a group of young women who had boyfriends and cousins facing the draft. Someone might bring up “we have to fight the commies” and there would be a discussion of the history of the war. But usually, the real question was not whether the war was right or wrong, but would a kid be willing to do something out of the ordinary, would they join a march, would they take our flyers and pass them out?
While the young of Lowell seemed open to opposing the war, most of their parents were still firmly in the camp of “America, right or wrong.”
After months of these conversations, on street corners, in bars, outside of schools, the Lowell organizing team decided it was time for a march to show that the anti-war movement had come to Lowell. Flyers were handed out across the city, throughout downtown, at the University and the Community College, at the High school. The whole city seemed to be buzzing about the march and debating the war. Just what we had hoped for. The organizers thought they would turn out 500 people for this first march.
Two days before the march was scheduled, I talked with Ira who was somewhat concerned.
“Michael,” he said, “I’m not sure what’s happening but in the last few days, a lot of kids
who‘d said they were marching are now saying they can’t. One kid in particular, I know he is with us, I know it. But now he keeps saying to me he can’t but he won’t say why.”
“Well often people get cold feet,” I said, “but I’m guessing once the march happens, they’ll join in.”
“No,” Ira responded, “something’s up, I am just not sure what. So, it’ll be good to have you and the rest of the organizers from other cities up here with us. Meet us early in front of City Hall.”
I thought nothing of this conversation at the time. So often we had seen people wrestle with the decision to take a first public step against the war.
Amy and I arrived early, meeting Ira and the other organizers who explained the plans for the March. We would start at City Hall and march through downtown Lowell. The lead contingent would be made up entirely of returned Vietnam veterans. A modest number of student anti-war activists from outside of Lowell showed up. We expected hundreds of Lowell young people to join us, but Ira said the numbers were definitely going to be lower than we had expected.
The late afternoon April light seemed harsh and flat as Amy and I made our way from our car toward City Hall, past Merrimack and Market streets—the streets filled with more young people than usual. The crowds large, roiling, talking, anxious, eager. Men were spilling out of bars, already juiced. As we walked by the crowds of young people, we could sense excitement. All around us were people nervously bouncing, talking heatedly. We could not make out the conversations. Perhaps, I thought, Ira is wrong, and this march is going to be larger than we thought.
While we made our way toward the assembly spot for the march, unknown to us another group was getting ready, the regulars at the Celtic Club, a drinking spot above the Lull and Hartford Sporting Goods, a place often referred to as a “tough joint.” Some days before, the Massachusetts State Police Red Squad accompanied by local police had dropped into the bar, searching out some of the toughest young people in the city, young men some of whom ran and enforced the street-level drug selling, ex-jocks, bouncers, leg-breakers and street corner toughs. We were told days after the march about what had transpired in the Celtic Club. Decades later, most of what we had been told was confirmed in an article in the Lowell Sun with the exception that the meeting with the police might have been the day of the march.
“Let us buy a round,” said the cops, to the surprise of the guys in the bar.
“Look,” the lead cop said, “you’re All American guys, you love our country right?”
“Of course,” replied Gauche Gothier, the de facto leader of the Celtic regulars.
“Look,” the cop went on. “You’ve heard about this planned march. Well, it’s not really about the war. It’s a ploy by a group of commies. They’re getting big money from Castro and the Cubans. Their real aim is to take over your streets, your turf.
“If you care about Lowell, if you love America, you need to get out there and kick the shit out of ’em. They don’t belong in Lowell. They wanna take over.”
The cops stood several more rounds. As everyone drank, the “Staties” passed around some pictures. “See this one—that’s Ira Arlook, he’s one of the leaders. See this guy with the mustache, that’s Ansara. He’s coming up for the march from Boston.”
Photos of the other organizers were shared, identities explained.
As the last round was drunk and one of the cops actually paid the barkeep, one of the
lead Staties concluded, “Look. No guns. We don’t want you to kill anyone. Just kick their asses, show them what Lowell men are made of. Do your patriotic job. Protect your turf. The cops will look the other way. Run these Commie maggots out of town.”
The Celtic crew was more than willing.
As Amy and I arrived at the march starting point, there were remarkably few policemen on the streets. Perhaps 200 hundred marchers assembled. There were eight or nine Vietnam vets, most wearing their fatigue jackets. A group of 30 students and a few professors from U Mass Lowell showed up. Some high school students. Our organizers from around the state. A group of women from Cambridge arrived, many wearing army surplus, several with head bands, carrying flags of the National Liberation Front. Several marchers showed up with Free Bobby Seal posters. Almost all the marchers were white except for a small contingent from public housing. Their leader pulled Ira aside.
“Look man, I’ve heard there is serious trouble coming. I better run home and get my piece.”
“No. Look, we got to keep things peaceful. Please.”
“OK Man, but I am telling you there is big-time trouble coming.”
Ira announced that we would start marching.
“Stay together,” he said, “watch out for trouble. Stick close and be careful. We’ve got marshals to guide us, please follow their lead.”
The Vietnam vets took their place at the head of the march. The small brigade of women swung in behind, the rest of the marchers following.
No sooner had the march begun than it became clear we were in for more trouble than we could possibly handle. The sidewalks were jammed with far more people than were marching; they pressed forward to get a good look at us. I had the distinct sense that the dense jostling crowds were eager, excited, and expectant, not actively hostile but not supportive. Every few minutes, the crowds would part and a wedge of young men swinging two-by-fours would charge into the march rapidly breaking it up. Soon we were ducking, trying to avoid a brick hurled from the back of the crowd. Suddenly a battered metal garbage can soared out of the back of the crowds and into the march, landing with a jarring clang and spilling its rotting contents onto the street. A beer bottle arced high, hit a woman in the head and she dropped, bloodied, and hurt. More beer bottles came flying. The worst damage, however, was done by the brawling guys with two-by-fours who kept sprinting into the march swinging wildly. I was jarred by the sound of wood hitting backs, the smash of bottles breaking on the street, the growing number of injured and bloody marchers.
The march quickly dissolved into a frightened and disorganized mess. It was clear that attempting to continue would result in serious injuries. The vets wanted to keep going. We said no, stop and head home. We started breaking people into clusters and shepherding them away in different directions as quickly as we could. We knew the only safety lay in splitting the marchers into so many different groups that those intent on attacking us could not follow everyone. Still, we wanted our people to stay in large enough groups that the size offered some protection. Skirmishes broke out all over the place as the protesters headed to cars and vans. Soon the marchers had all gone. But the crowds of kids swelled and remained.
Amy and I finished successfully escorting one group to their cars and decided to head for our car and beat a retreat. Stupidly, we were alone. We had to walk back across
Merrimack Street and the downtown to get to our car. Taking off our anti-war buttons, we hoped no one would know who we were. We were wrong.
Crossing Merrimack Street, a small group of young men spotted us and yelled to each other, “There is one of the cocksuckers!”
I was now quite worried.
I told Amy, “Let’s walk, not run, quickly in the other direction.”
The small pack of men walked briskly parallel to us on the other side of the street taunting and yelling.
“Don’t pay any attention,” I said to Amy, “just keep walking.”
She put her head down and strode on purposefully. Everything slowed down and then sped into a blur of motion as Gauche Gauthier and his Celtic crew sprinted across the street, charging into us. Amy went flying, ending up wrapped around a parking meter. In a fraction of a second, Gauthier himself confronted me. I thought nothing, reacted not at all, as he suddenly swung a practiced right to the jaw followed by a quick combination from the left.
I felt the impact, a quick blow on one side of the jaw followed by the blow on the other side. The adrenaline was pumping. I couldn’t think straight. I was worried about Amy. I wanted to get us out of there but had no idea how. I just stood there. Hands down. He looked at me in surprise. I was still standing. Later he would tell Ira that he was certain he had broken my jaw and was expecting me to fall. For a minute we just stood there looking at each other.
A passing group of older men, seeing a young couple in obvious distress and not knowing, perhaps not caring, who we were, came across the street and yelled at the younger guys to knock it off. Amy stood up, bruised but not seriously hurt. We huddled close together. As the guys who had attacked us followed, the older men escorted us around the corner, telling us we should be OK now and veered off. We walked down the street as quickly as we could without running. Suddenly, ahead of us, we could see a much larger crowd of kids, screaming, laughing, running, throwing things randomly at windows, totally out of control and coming directly at us. At this point the smaller group behind picked up their pace. We were caught in the middle. The crowd in front was in full charge. The small group behind us running to catch up.
As we realized how much trouble we were in, we also realized why the older “good Samaritans” had suggested we would be ok. We sprinted for the only open doorway that offered safety—the front door of the Lowell Police Station.
We rushed in and sat down. Outside the young crowds were in an uproar. The violence against the march was quickly replaced by a joyful explosion of youthful revolt against authority as the crowd began to attempt to storm the police station. We were forgotten in a surge of rebellion directed at the police. Worried police broke out black helmets, chest protectors and—looking ominously anonymous and slightly robotic—charged past us to protect the front of the station. Shortly a few cops went into the back room and came out with shotguns. As the lethal violence of the state was made manifest, we sat there, silent, unsettled, attempting to pull ourselves back together.
Everyone was too busy to pay attention to us.
We watched, pained and miserable, as two of the police in riot gear dragged in a young man, one pulling him by the arms, the other alternating between pushing him and beating
him with his baton. The young man, in bell-bottom jeans, brown hair down to his shoulders, his band-emblazoned tee shirt now torn, screamed at the cops as he was dragged along the floor, “Get off me you fucking pigs!” Each yell occasioned more beating. They dragged him past us and into the back to the cells. Amy and I found it hard to sit there, to do nothing. But the alternative seemed to be to leave, and outside the crowd was raging. We sat, silent, ashamed.
Every few minutes, policemen would return from out front, dragging another young man from the crowd outside. Soon we could hear screams coming from the cells in the back as furious police vented their anger on the rebellious kids. Slowly the crowds were beaten back from the front of the police station. More prisoners were dragged swearing and screaming into the station and worked over in the back.
After some time, the state police Red Squad, smiling, obviously quite pleased with the results of their work, strolled in and started to mock us.
We continued to sit. And as we sat, saying nothing, I thought, this is upside down. The young people of Lowell are in revolt, are being beaten by angry cops, and they want to kick the shit out of us.
The momentary youth revolt burned out, doused in part by the arrests. Slowly calm settled. We could no longer hear the noise of angry crowds outside. Still, we continued to sit. After a time, a small trickle of young men and a few young women made their way into the station hoping to get friends released.
Soon we were joined on our bench by a group of men in their mid- twenties there to collect their friends. They did not know who we were and assumed we were there for the same reason.
The one sitting closest to me asked in a friendly tone:
“You heard when the cops are gonna release people? Or are they gonna hold them for processing?”
“I’m not here for a friend. Nope, haven’t heard anything about timing. Who are you here for?”
“Some of the guys we work with.”
“Oh,” I asked, “were you breaking up the march? Was that why they got busted?”
He laughed and gestured toward the rest of his group down the bench.
“No. We thought the march was all fucked up, but we don’t like the war either. We were just watching what was going on but when the cops tried to bust some of us, then it was all in. We don’t let anyone push us around.”
I asked where they all worked.
At the GE plant,” he said.
I asked about how that work was and what they thought of their union. Good jobs, they said. Decent pay and bennies. Decent union.
“Well,” I said, “my wife here—Amy—and I helped organize the march tonight.”
“Shit, you don’t say!”
“Yes, we’re dead opposed to the war. I hate that so many guys from Lowell have to fight and you know the sons of the rich don’t go. The war is wrong and I don’t want to see another American die over there for no reason at all.”
“Amen brother,” came the response.
“You know,” he said, bringing the rest of his buddies into the conversation, “we all
served in Nam. We don’t support the fucking war. We know what’s going on.”
“So why did you hate the march?” I asked.
They listed their reasons in rapid and compelling order:
“You marched under the flag of the Viet Cong—they killed our buddies. We respect them—they’re tough motherfuckers, but it disrespects our dead and us to march under that flag.”
There was nothing I could say. I thought about all the years of hating the war and then hating the government that prosecuted it. I thought of how we had steadily slipped into a rage and in that rage, it seemed that we wanted to take the most extreme position of opposition that we could. How could I explain my path from loving the Declaration of Independence and believing in American exceptionalism to marching with NLF flags? I didn’t bring them or wave them. I didn’t chant “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win.” But I had been totally comfortable marching with others who did. How could I explain any of that to these guys? How could I make sense of it myself?
They went on, getting heated:
“You had a group of women all march together and taunt us. What’s that about?. Trying to piss us off? Well, you succeeded. Some of them were waving the Viet Cong flag, waving posters of Ho. What the fuck was that about? That was fucking insulting us.”
Again, I had no response. I felt sick to my stomach. I liked these guys.
Then, one of them stated with finality, “And you don’t come from here.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s true we don’t live here, but my father was born on Fletcher Street in the Acre and grew up here.”
That seemed to make me, and by extension Amy, somewhat less foreign. Moreover it was as if the act of listening respectfully while they explained what we had done wrong, had created a bond at least for that moment on that strange spring night.
I smiled at them and said, “I hear you. We respect you and your sacrifices. Really, we do. We want to make sure that no one else has to go to Nam. We’ve spent so much time opposing this damn war, sometimes we get carried away. But I hear you. We should’ve been marching under the American flag. I hear you. We love our country, but we hate this fucking war—and we hate the people who sent you over there. The ones who sit in their nice offices and send others to kill and die.”
As we sat on that hard wooden bench in the Lowell police station, waiting for their friends to be released, we relaxed into talking about everything, anything: did we like the Stones, what did we think could stop Nixon, we all agreed he was no good. Amy asked more about their experiences in Nam, and they shared stories, some funny, some frightening. We made the point that many Vietnam Veterans were joining the anti-war movement. They weren’t sure that they could do that since they didn’t want to dishonor the sacrifices of their friends who had died there. But they were against the war so maybe. But what about those damn flags and the women?
Amy tried to talk about why women were marching together and how it was time for the roles of women to change. Their response to that was at best skeptical. Then we asked about their experiences with the police and that produced an outburst of profanity and more stories. We listened more than we talked.
After their friends were finally released, many battered, they introduced them to us. As we all got up to leave, they made a point of protectively walking us to our car to ensure
that we did not get into any more trouble. Both Amy and I felt totally thrown off kilter. The embarrassment and the irony of being in that police station was intense. The idea that the police had protected us from young Americans who also opposed the war but were insulted by us was profoundly upsetting.
I recognized their truths. How would I feel if my closest friend had been killed in Vietnam? I would hate the war that killed him. But I would not respond to anyone marching under the flag of the enemy. I understood how disrespectful and challenging we seemed. As much as a feminist as I thought myself, I also understood that there was a discussion and a process needed to get American men to change. Confronting men with chanting brigades of women might not be the best way to get that discussion started. We needed to listen as much as we talked. More than anything else we needed to be respectful of the people we wanted to reach and organize – and we were going about it in the wrong way. I felt I had just seen how much I had to learn. I liked and respected those young men who had sat on the bench next to us that night. I felt despair that the student and anti-war movements would ever be able to change enough to reach them. I also felt new hope that they could be reached. I was determined to learn a better way to organize.
Ira and the other organizers went out in Lowell the next day. Their audacity so impressed the group that had broken up the march, that a meeting was set up. Slowly trust was built. Gauche and his guys realized that they had been played. They promised to protect the next anti-war march in Lowell, and they did. No one had the audacity to explain that with them on our side, there would be no one to protect the march from.
Laid Off
PAUL MARION
One of my pre-school memories is a composite of scenes with my father during the day when he was not working at the mill, when he was “laid off.” That was the term I heard. Laid off. Told by the boss to stay home because the company did not have enough business activity to keep him employed. When this happened, he qualified for unemployment insurance. He would be “collecting,” as people said. Collecting unemployment checks. He was also said to be “loafing,” but that was not precise and even cruel. Loafing makes me think of Walt Whitman: “I loafe and invite my soul,/I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.” For my father there was little of this kind of sauntering. It was not his choice to be out of work in the 1950s, sometimes for months at a stretch.
I was too young to know that the national economy was right in our kitchen. According to federal economic reports, the textile industry took one of the worse hits in the recession of 1957-58, which knocked five million people out of all kinds of work. The Northeast had high job losses. The post-WWII economic surge had topped off. Business growth lagged, and personal spending contracted. Also, an Asian flu pandemic slowed exports in manufacturing, and interest rates rose as the Federal Reserve banking system countered inflation. Nationwide, the unemployment rate reached 7.5 percent by mid-1958. After the highest joblessness since the 1930s, the rate dropped to below 5 percent by 1960. Lowell from 1950 to 1957 ranked as an area of “persistent high unemployment” with an average rate of 7.9 percent. Another term I heard when I was a bit older was “a depressed area.”
I was assigned to Dad on the days when my mother worked in the women’s clothing store in downtown Lowell. One vivid scenario: My father drives my mother to work downtown with me in the back seat of the car. After dropping her off at the corner of Merrimack and John streets, Dad parks the car at a meter near the store. The two of us walk down Paige Street on the back side of the five-and-ten-cent stores to a bar called Marty’s, known for having one of the longest bar tops in the state, stretching the length of the building from Paige Street over to Merrimack, from back door to front. We sit in a booth upholstered with slippery red material, not cloth. My father orders a glass of draft beer for himself and an orangeade for me. Always a glass of orangeade from the soda fountain. I’m four years old. We have one drink and then go. Never two drinks.
Sometimes we made a pit stop at the men’s restroom that was under the sidewalk on the back side of the five-and-tens. The men’s and women’s facilities here were the only public restrooms in the city. Many years later the stairs were sealed over. One day an urban archeologist will discover the toilets under Paige Street.
At home in Dracut, the “laid off” days passed. Time must have dragged for my father.
He kept busy around the house, working in the yard or down cellar or helping his parents next door. There’s always something to maintain or clean when you own a house. He built a solid workbench in the cellar using scrap wood and his few tools. When he was younger, he had done a little carpentry with his Marion cousins who ran a construction company. The Marion name is associated with building in the area. Louis Marion’s company built one of the yellow-brick buildings in the historic quadrangle of the old Lowell Textile School, one of the predecessors of today’s Lowell campus of the University of Massachusetts. An old friend of mine says the Marions were cathedral builders. Sometimes when my father was driving the family around, he would point out a house that he had helped build. (My mother never got a driver’s license because she was too nervous to drive a car. She took lessons but could never get the hang of it. For years, she called taxis to pick her up in Dracut to go to work in downtown Lowell).
John Mullen worked with my father at Gilet Carbonizing, at first in Lowell and then in North Chelmsford. He supervised scouring machines on the lower level of the mill, a job I did for two days in the summer of 1972. Here’s my take on what it felt like in Satan’s glowing red, infected bowels:
No adjective for the heat. My olive-green T-shirt blackens before work starts on the scouring train in the cellar of this mill. I’m the keeper of the vats, three linked in a fifty-foot machine, my train between two more. A chute drops raw wool into harsh detergent soup, bubbling the shit out of it, then a big claw rakes acrid slop from vat one to the next until the whole mess hits the dryers.
Like an underground sentry, I march up and down a yard-wide walk, using a hoe to unclog grates beneath each vat where steaming liquid strains into a waste-way. There are regular red alerts—when a section plugs, muck flows over, and scalding soapy stew boils up, I run down to scoop out crap. The stink of cooked sheep dung, bleach, oil, and sweat makes me plan to burn my jeans at home.
With no fans, no relief, and the sight of my twenty-year-man teacher, I know there’s no tomorrow.
I’m in awe of the will it must have required for a man like Mullen to report every day to that underworld. The commitment baffles me, but his is another example of the sacrifices made by people who were determined to make a life and earn a living in America.
John said it straight: “When I first went there in 1939, let me tell you, you wouldn’t want a dog to work in the place. And I was a dog at the time, lucky to get a job. I did all the shit jobs in the world that were lousy there. When you’re a new guy, you get, well, you know what you get.”
John talked about the boss, George Noval. “He probably was the only one that could really speak English and knew every process in the mill. The people in the Pawtucketville neighborhood of Lowell can be thankful to him because if there was an opening somebody from Pawtucketville got the job. The place was ninety percent French other than the early people that were there, who were Portuguese and Polish.”
My father had lined up the summer job for me, which meant asking for a favor unlike he had ever done at the mill. I’m sure I caused a problem, even embarrassment, when I told him the stench of the scouring machines made me nauseous to the point of vomiting and that I could not make it past the morning on the second day. He didn’t chew me out, however, and sucked up the news that he had to give to the big boss. I told him I’d apply for a job at a fast-food counter rather than go back to the mill.
Lucky for me, my mother got me in at the women’s clothing store where she was a senior salesclerk. The manager hired me part-time to run the manual elevator. I could hardly have painted a more different job setting. I needed to help pay for college tuition and to put gas in the creaky 1966 Ford Galaxie 500 that had been handed down to me when my father got my grandfather’s black Mercury sedan after he bought a new pine-green, two-door Comet. The Galaxie looked like it had leprosy, the silver-blue paint flaking off from hood to trunk.
In October, I gained a windfall benefit. My parents sold their small ranch house in Dracut because Dad wanted to get out of house-care worries. We moved to a two-bedroom, garden-style apartment on the west side of town, Whitecliff Manor—how upscale British sounding. With a small profit from the house sale, my parents bought themselves their first new car, a bronze 1972 Ford Torino, automatic transmission with a stick shift (Dad said, “I can die now.”) and got a new, chocolate-brown Ford Pinto hatchback for me—for commuting to Merrimack College in North Andover, where Red Sox star Carl Yastrzemski had earned a bachelor’s degree in off-season classes. I ran the Pinto for ten years, until the engine burst into flames one afternoon outside my mechanic’s shop while I was inside explaining the car’s latest problem. I know the Pinto is a cultural punchline in 1970s humor, but I squeezed every ounce of value out of that car. My folks had paid less than $2,000 for my “ride” ten years before.
John Mullen spoke with Mehmed Ali of the Lowell Historical Society for two hours in June 2002, recollecting the mill work and labor organizing of his day. I was invited to sit in. He was eighty-five-years old, articulate, white-haired, and had a face like Kirk Douglas the actor. He remembered one strike whose aim was to get a ten-cent raise for the textile workers. He laughed: “Even if you ask for nothing, the owners can’t afford it.” Industry executives considered Gilet to be a top plant in woolens and worsteds. He counted three or four strikes in the 1940s when my father was hired at the Lowell mill, which stood at the Lower Locks complex of the Pawtucket Canal where today’s UMass Lowell’s Inn & Conference Center is seen (the site of a Hilton hotel in the 1980s). Gilet’s later moved to a mill complex in North Chelmsford near a railroad line.
John ticked off names of men who worked with my father: Joe Halloran, Bucky Landry, Bill Jezek, George Brouillard, and Marcel Vervaert, “Big Marcel,” who taught my father, “Little Marcel,” how to sort wool, a trade that served him for forty years. One time an anthrax scare shook up the employees. “An old French guy on the third floor who opened the bales of sheep fleeces got sick enough to see a doctor,” said John. A doctor saved his infected eye. He never returned to work. In the business, anthrax is known as “the wool sorter’s disease,” and it was a constant concern.
“Wool sorters were the elite in the mill in the early days,” said John. “You can be proud of your father. They can take a handful of wool and make three or four different sorts, grades of wool [like Prime and Choice for beef grades]. It was amazing to see those fellows in action. People from Rhode Island and Lawrence, Mass., came to work at the Gilet factory because of the high pay we were able to get for the wool sorters. That skill was hard to find anyway. I never had any trouble negotiating a wage for the wool sorters.”
John smiled as he recalled a colorful character from his time. “There was a fellow named Harry Healey who believed that wool sorters were the top of the heap. He came to work all dressed up. At the shop he’d put on a white frock. And guess what he had in his briefcase? His lunch. But he would take a shower after work every day and put his suit back on to go
home. You should see that white frock after eight hours of sorting wool. Oh, oh! Well, you know, raw wool is full of burrs, dirt, and shit.”
He admitted he was an irritant to the boss, but John says “We improved operations 1,000 percent—1,000. In the early ‘50s, I got the hell out of there, and then went to work for the United Fund in 1955. I should have stayed with the union, because in the textile thing I was president. We had a Woolen and Worsted Division of the United Textile Workers of America from the AFofL-CIO. We had several plants, Southwell and others, so with my big mouth they elected me president of the council.”
Looking at me he said, “Your father was one of the union stewards. I’m sure he was because I was smart enough to make sure that even with the elite that I got the guys that I wanted. And I know Marcel was always up front. He was always up front.”
The 1953-55 Labor Agreement between the Gilet company of Lowell and the United Textile Workers of America, A.F. of L., Local No.734 is a fifty-two-page document detailing the terms and conditions for union security, hours of employment (forty hours a week, eight hours a day), seniority, basic force level, wages and cost of living adjustment, holiday pay and vacation, military service, management and discharge, union notices, safety and health, grievances and arbitration, health benefits, miscellaneous items and the term of the contract. The wool sorters would be paid $1.86 per hour, second only to over-lookers who would earn $1.97. Scourers like John’s first slot came in at $1.39. The agreement was signed by the company president Albert J. Gilet. Kenneth G. Clark signed for the national union, and for Local 734 six names are listed: John J. Mullen, William J. Landry, Gerard Morrissette, George Brouillard, Marcel Marion, and William Jezek.
And even with all John Mullen describes the owners and managers in the 1950s ridded themselves of the union. By the time I was old enough to understand, the collective protection of organized labor was gone from my father’s workplace. Conditions deteriorated, he was furloughed more often, and the once well-compensated wool sorting no longer drew top dollar. John Mullen chalks up the decline to increasing competition, shifting markets, and technological changes.
In the months out of the mill, Dad explored other options such as a job in electronics. He’s kept a notebook with mimeograph drawings of tubes and circuits. This may have been a TV repair class. I can’t tell. The diagrams show audio output, amplifier operation, grid voltage, electron-emitting cathode, photo-sensitive material. The notes are about transformer couplings, plate resistor, capacitor, and transconductance. Stored with the notebook was an exam book for a police services job. This may have been something he looked into after the war.
The workbench was Dad’s area in the cellar. It was eight feet long and the height of a kitchen counter. Built like a box against the back wall of the house foundation, the bench was open in the front and had a tabletop surface about a yard deep. When I was small, I had to stand on a stool to reach the back of the top counter. Underneath there were used paint cans, boards of various sizes, large and small saws, pieces of metal, and other items that were too useful to throw out. On top he kept his mix-and-match tools: no two screwdrivers were from the same family of implements. A couple of dozen jars and small boxes held nails, screws, hooks, brass hinges.
One winter he organized the nails and screws in old jelly and peanut butter jars whose covers were nailed into a board that was in turn nailed to beams above the workbench so
that Dad could reach up and unscrew the jar containing the needed nail or hook. I’ve seen this arrangement in cellars of old houses in the area. Baby food jars are a good size for small screws and washers. At the back of the countertop more remnant parts and supplies were stacked, waiting for the next home improvement.
In the months out of work, my father had a lot of time to think and read. He enjoyed the writings of the longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer and Edward Bellamy’s social critique Looking Backward: 2000-1887. In his own way he was spiritual, just without the dogma and clerical trappings. He said the Pope should sell all the gold ornaments in the Vatican and use the money to feed hungry people. His anti-clerical views made me take a pass on the chance to be an altar server, which baffled nuns who taught me. I preferred not to do that. On top of Sunday Mass with my family, the school required weekly Crusader Masses, First Friday Mass, Easter Week and Christmas Masses, and Holy Day of Obligation Masses, which gave me plenty of capital in the God Bank, I figured.
A few years before my father died of cancer in 1982, I published a meditation on him in my first pamphlet of writing:
Dad’s middle name was super-French, Réal, in the category of Hormidas, Salomé, and Déodat from the older generations. I pictured him trudging down muddy German roads in 1945, one eye on Bavaria, his combat boots worn thin. Did he see himself, twenty years ahead, sorting raw wool in the San Joaquin Valley of California, touring the sheep spreads and talking French to the Basque farmers?
State dinners in Washington with ambassadors and movie stars made him sick to his dailybread stomach. It’s a good thing he enjoyed the Red Sox. “Jefferson was a genius,” he’d said. “Something went wrong. Mazuma did it. Money corrupts absolutely.” Taking off his glasses, he’d sigh. “I dunno what’s gonna happen.” There were no political junkets for him, no study trips to Sweden and Japan. He had to be happy with native corn and tomatoes in August. Who knows that Corporal Marcel Marion studied Greek and Latin and geometry in the junior seminary in the White Mountains of New Hampshire?
Once, watching a TV symphony, he said to my mother, “Now there’s a guy who did something in his life. He composed music. What did I do?”
“You had a family, three sons, that’s something.”
My father used to say he had seen our country’s best days. He worked, read, wanted to travel, enjoyed his grandsons, liked to bet a buck, drank a beer. My father had questions.
Remembering Bob Martin
Bob Martin (1942-2022) was one of the outstanding artists in the history of Lowell, Mass., and an important songwriter and musician among his peers and many fans. For his memorial service, Bob requested readings from various spiritual traditions including “Hail Mary,” and “The Heart Sutra”; “Danny Boy”; passages by James Joyce and Thomas Wolfe; “Blackbird” by Lennon and McCartney; an Irish Blessing; and his own song “Goin’ Home.” The speakers, singers, and players were Tami Martin Keaveny, Jesse Martin, Jack Keaveny, Delia Keaveny, Brian Bowles, Sandy Spence Goulet, Paul Richardson, Dave Perry, and me. Following are selected remarks from “A Celebration of Life: A Memorial Service for Bob Martin” at Martin Funeral Home, Tyngsboro, Mass., Sunday, October 2, 2022.—PM
photo by Paul H. Richardson
A LYRICAL JOURNEY
BY TAMI MARTIN KEAVENY, WITH LYRICS BY BOB MARTIN
“I was born in the turning of the tide, just this side of a mill town by the sea.”
My father Bob Martin lived an amazing life. A lyrical journey. A genius, a polymath, storyteller, folksinger, teacher, painter, prankster—a madman—he was called a lot of things. In his younger days he was nicknamed Wheels for the constant whirring inside of his endlessly curious mind. He had dozens of nicknames over the years—including Lou, Ro, Boogs, Pickle, Pucky, Veegie, and some things mom called him on occasion that I won’t mention. But I am one of two fortunate people who can call him Dad.
One of my earliest childhood memories, is of my father answering my questions about God. What is God? Who is God? Is God a person?
He answered me by taking me outside and pointing to the attributes of each plant in his bountiful garden, explaining that nature was perfect in its life cycle.
“Her morning song makes the sun come up. Put a dime in her old tin cup, and play that Jesus song for me.”
This conversation about the life force continued throughout my life.
Dad had formal religion in his youth, explored the secular Franciscan order, then left the Catholic church to marry his beloved Anne Marie. As he engaged the 1960s counterculture movement, his explorations in spirituality wound through the works of Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell, the teachings of Don Juan, into existentialism and eventually Buddhism felt right to him.
“Yesterday’s grease in the fry-o-later. Door got stuck on the elevator. Never made it in time for the job as a waiter, so they made him a busboy.”
A runner and a vegetarian since the early 1970s who practiced yoga most of his life, health and physical wellbeing were my father’s true religion. After we moved to the farm in West Virginia, he introduced family regimens, replacing the table salt with sea kelp, dosing us with vitamins, spoonfuls of bee pollen from the hives, taking brewer’s yeast, wheat germ oil, hops and goldenseal root teas, chewing on garlic cloves, and at some point there was some supposed redeeming quality from fermented quail eggs that became a bridge too far for me.
“Don’t it seem like you’re never gonna leave and get out on your own. Don’’ it seem when your young the time goes by so slow.”
The American Midwest, Rio, Juarez, these were places of imagination for my dad, places he had never actually been—he wrote adeptly about the road and wanderlust, but he was a proud native son of Lowell, Massachusetts.
A child of Depression-era parents, whose own parents had arrived in the melting pot to weave the fabric, and make a living from the river, Dad had a fascination with the stories of drifters, and desperate characters, people leashed to their fates by economic struggle and social exile.
Chuck’s Bar, Silver Star Lounge, cotton trains from Georgia, French girls from the factory, his definitive Americana often featured Lowell as its main character.
“Big feet clickin’ down the country dirt road. Don’t cha worry bout your tail, draggin behind.”
He consumed life in large ways. Always over the top. He attended and shot his own footage at the original Woodstock, that became a family home movie shown at gatherings, mixed into the birthday party and anniversary Super 8’s of the time.
He hosted seances, explored Bigfoot sightings, tracked UFOs as part of SETI out of UC Berkeley, and once strung enough heavy-duty extension cords end-to-end to reach the highest hill on our farm in West Virginia where he stayed up all night flashing highpowered light patterns to signal potential space travelers.
He built computers, launched his own businesses around early technology. He wrote two books of historical fiction—one based on the Appalachian drug cartel of the 1980s and another crafted from the records of a 20th-century hospital for the criminally insane in upstate New York.
Once, dad returned from a trip to Ireland, with new connections to his ancestry, and a mad passion for baking Irish soda bread. He then guarded his crusty result as if it were gold, to the point where he would hide it. Sometimes forgetting where he hid it, and then interrogating the family to find out “Who stole my Irish bread?”
“She eats a bowl of nails for breakfast, she can’t be more than three feet tall.”
Dad usually led with humor. He had a Vaudevillian lineage, and he loved a joke, a prank, always had a trick up his sleeve. Many of us in the room lost bets to him by cracking a smile while he counted to 10 or fell victim to some ruse where he showed up in a disguise. And if you beat him at his own game, he made sure to come back and get you again.
“Maybe time and the turn of season, makin’ changes in me.”
Aren’t we lucky? This was something Dad said over and over during the past 20 years. It was the greatest joy of his life to become a grandfather. He regarded Jack & Delia as treasures, “How’s my darlins?” he would ask when we spoke.
He was interested in every step Jack took in life, and when I called him to tell him that I had named Delia after his grandmother, Delia Laep, who’d left the small community of Tuam, Ireland in county Galway to start a new life in America, Dad wept to the point of speechlessness.
“It took a lifetime to learn, and now she knows. Time is a lie.”
Dad was so bound to my mother that they became one word: Bobnanne.
When we learned we were facing the final days of Dad’s life. Mom, who had been riding shotgun on Bob Martin’s magical mystery tour for over 56 years and watched his difficult decline for the past 10, said simply: “I’m gonna miss him tons.”
“Stay a while sunshine. Sing your green song.”
Bob Martin’s amazing life was a lyrical journey of omniscience. He leaves us with great gifts. Great memories. Lots of laughs. New ideas. And all that music.
He never feared death, looking at it as the next great frontier to be explored. In our later conversations about mortality, he would remind me that “energy never dies” and he would always be here. And for that I say, “Aren’t we lucky?”
“Captain Jesus, take the wheel in your hand. Sail me home to the milk & honey land.”
BOB BY PAUL RICHARDSON
It may well seem like a tired old cliché to describe someone as a renaissance man, but in the case of Bob Martin, he came closer to deserving that honorific than anyone I’ve ever personally known. His interests were myriad and stunningly varied, and he tackled each of them with a passion bordering on ferocity. When he took something on, whether it be music, writing, painting, or anything else, he held nothing back. Even in the case of something like making kombucha, where I watched him behave like a mad scientist obsessed with getting the formula just right, he cut no corners.
Where does he get this energy and conviction? I would wonder to myself. Who is this guy? I first met Bob back in the eighties, when somehow or other I got dragged to his house during the Jack Kerouac dedication festivities, and I remember wondering, what am I doing here? Who are these people, and in particular who is that guy running around with a guitar, a look of fury and resolve on his face? Is he deep, I wondered, or just a little crazed? Well, as it turned out the answer was both. All geniuses are a little crazed. It’s a prerequisite for the job. It took a while for us to really get to know one another, but over the next few years Bob and I would occasionally meet up at the Old Worthen, and during that time we came to realize that we had a lot in common in terms of our outlook on life, and after a certain period I found myself actively seeking him out to exchange ideas with. He made me laugh, and drew me in to his world, which was a world characterized by an appreciation of irony steadied by a quest for meaning.
Everyone knows Bob was a gifted musician but beyond that I saw something else in his song writing beyond the usual. I came to see him as a kind of playwright, in the tradition of Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Eugene O’Neil. He wrote songs about small people caught up in the vortex of life, people trying to stake out a claim for their souls and make sense of it all. Those songs were, in a real sense, small masterpieces of theater. He had his own cast of drifters and broken-hearted romantics, individuals living out their lives of quiet desperation as they measured out their days in coffee spoons. I played his albums over and over again, always wondering, who is this guy? And how does he know such things about everyone? And that was the key to his talent: his songs were about all of us, and the greater the loss you felt in your own life the more he was singing directly to you.
You undoubtedly all know the album called The River Turns the Wheel, a mid-career work that was a meditation on the town Bob was from, and the ways in which we try to age with something approaching grace. Bob was a great listener, which in my mind explains why he was such a great writer. He was genuinely interested in hearing the stories you had to tell. Bob was driven by a desire to get to the bottom of things, a need to somehow have those things make sense as part of a larger quest to decode what it meant to be human.
My wife Kim and I came to trust and respect Bob and Anne Marie more and more as time went on, to the extent that we asked them to be godparents to our daughter Paige—a request that they accepted with humility and grace. And they doted on Paige whenever they saw her, as I knew they would. But time moved on and as we came ever more under the
demands of living the everyday lives we’re all yoked to, we didn’t see as much of each other in later years as I would have liked. You could even say that living itself gets in the way of the lives we really want to live. So, we didn’t see much of Bob and Anne in the last few years, though they were able to attend Paige’s wedding three years ago, and in my mind they occupied a position of honor there. It was like being reunited with lost family members.
And then last winter, when I heard that Bob was ill, I was crushed. I got out one of his albums and listened to it from start to finish while driving aimlessly in my car. I had a feeling I wouldn’t be seeing him again, and it was a feeling that sadly proved to be all too true. but I comfort myself in knowing that we still have his music, and I sometimes find myself visualizing the Pekinese dog called Baby on the boardwalk at Salisbury Beach, and a quiet Stella Kerouac and those zebras on the wall. I’ll never forget those images; they’re as indelibly fixed in mind as my image of Bob is, in all his ferocious yearning to find meaning in the stories of others. A giant of a man has left us, and we’re all a little bit poorer for it. And yet, I still sometimes find myself asking, who was that guy?
BOB MARTIN BY DAVE PERRY
In early 1986, I was preparing to move from Connecticut to Lowell and a reporter’s job at the daily paper. The gig included being the Sun’s designated music writer. My friend Bill Morrissey had some advice: Look up Bob Martin. “Trust me. Guy’s an amazing songwriter. He’s the real thing.” Bob grew up in Lowell. Then he sang Lowell.
He loved the R&B vocal gymnastics of Clyde McPhatter and Little Anthony & The Imperials.
But with his weathered voice and vast storytelling gifts, he was destined to be a singersongwriter.
I dug for Bob’s records when I got to Lowell. I snagged a promo copy of Midwest Farm Disaster for three bucks at Harvey’s Bookland and Last Chance Rider, released in 1982, up the street at Record Lane for 10 bucks. And … man.
Midwest Farm Disaster arrived on RCA precisely fifty years ago in October 1972. The same year also produced Eat a Peach, Exile on Main Street, Something/Anything, Ziggy Stardust, Harvest, and an album called Black Unity by the jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, who left us three days after Bob.
Midwest Farm Disaster’s rewards grew over time for those lucky enough to find it. Eleven songs, recorded in single takes over three days in Nashville. His was backed by members of the elite group of session players John Sebastian celebrated as “Nashville Cats.”
Drummer Kenney Buttrey was fresh off laying down the beat for Neil Young’s Heart of Gold.
Sandy Spence was among those who found Midwest Farm Disaster, at fifteen, and wore out her copy singing harmony to it. She became quite a singer and years later, Bob would ask her to sing harmony of his River Turns the Wheel and Next to Nuthin’ albums, as well as in concert. She describes singing with him as “transcendent.”
Midwest Farm Disaster arrived just as glam rock reared its glittery heels. Bob was denim and plaid.
His record was laced with bedrock values and stories of good people facing hard times. Decency, hard work, family, taking care of your fellow man. In a time of Nixon and Watergate, it was FDR.
It was loaded with Lowell, right down to the line in “Charlie Zink” when Charlie served “a glass of water and potato stew” Bob sings “pa-daydah” The longer I’ve lived here, the more sense it all made.
Bob’s songs were a mirror—you found yourself and our neighbors in them. Without proper promotion, it ended up in dollar bins. But look at the Amazon page for the CD version. You’ll see entry after entry by folks whose dollar yielded a lifetime of rewards, a lasting love of Bob Martin.
Bob played everywhere, including opening for Merle Haggard at Lowell Memorial Auditorium on April 18, 1999. By then, he was a fireplug of a man. When he pulled out his guitar you didn’t know if he was going to play it or beat the crap out of it. Bob did Lowell proud. As for spotlights and big fame eluding him, there’s a line in “Mill Town” that sums up his timing. “Seems I’ve always been one day before tomorrow, he sings.” A Buddhist would say that wherever you are, you’re right where you’re supposed to be.
In 1982, he recorded a second album, Last Chance Rider, followed by 1997’s The River Turns the Wheel, 2000’s Next to Nuthin’ and a live album from the Bull Run. His work was honest. Like his father, he painted houses. He did carpentry. And he was a teacher. He taught computers at the Pawtucketville and Varnum schools. When Bob signed that RCA record deal, he was teaching math in Bolton. He made $6,400 a year. He had a wife and two kids and an artistic itch to scratch. So he did. He toured. A lot. Missing his family, he got out.
He bought a 120-acre spread atop a mountain in West Virginia. He sold some of the land to pay the mortgage, then got some grants and founded the Mountain Heritage School in Union, West Virginia. It taught traditional arts, from weaving to fiddle playing. Jenn Kearney visited the farm one July in the mid 1990s, part of a group of local musicians. “It was so beautiful there,” she says. “At night, you’d look up and it was like you were in a planetarium. But it was the real thing.”
“Bob was very Lowell, very down to Earth.” Says Jenn. “I learned about being a humble musician from him. He was already accomplished but he was always Bob from Lowell, never full of himself. I always looked up to him as a songwriter.
The echo of Bob Martin will always be here. In local music. Jenn and the Poorhouse Records artists of the ‘90s revered him. If you don’t hear him in the songs of Frank Morey, you’re not listening. The teacher is never gone if their lessons live on.
Dear Mary Lou,
DAVID DANIEL
It’s been a long time since you’ve heard from me & vice versa. Why I’m writing now—a total shot in the dark—today I drove across one of the bridges on the Merrimack, the big river here where I live in Lowell, Mass—one of 5 in all (bridges, not rivers), but this is the one I take to work & driving across it you feel it clatter & shake the bones. Anyways, I was reminded of another big river back . . . jeez, all those years ago, and when I got home I Googled you, but no go. I did find your Oregon address in an old notebook though, so . . . snail mail it is.
I got remembering the night we met, new arrivals at UO, transfer students, and the dorm council advertised a “get acquainted” pub crawl (something that’d never fly these days). We were strangers from opposite coasts—you a beautiful California girl that I thought didn’t exist outside of Beach Boys songs; me a nose-in-a-book Boston guy— somehow, finding that synch right off. We ditched the pub crawl & you asked, “Wanna get loaded?” and that was the frisson (I think that’s the word). Off we wandered, strangers in a strange town, to discover Eugene on our own.
Which we did over the next days and weeks in free time from classes. You’d give that innocent look, “Wanna get . . . ?” the rest unspoken. We’d toke in your dorm room and listen to records. You were always turning me on to music I’d somehow missed: Pure Prairie League, Commander Cody, Poco . . . your Fresno country roots showing.
In the easy groove of being friends—which is what we were; you had an old man back home and I had an old lady—we’d wander around the town finding stuff . . . that cozy bookstore w/ tea & comfy chairs, and Mama’s Home Fried Truck Stop, and Taylor’s on the corner of 13th & Kincaid where we’d drink dark beer and eat one of those great burgers they served. Remember the bathroom there? With the plaque: RICHARD M. NIXON Memorial Toilet? These days it’s maybe the TRUMP DUMPER.
I never saw so much rain as in Eugene, rain & mossy roofs—but soft rain, and we’d roam in it sometimes, “no particular place to go” (sez Chuck Berry), or walk “at lilac evening” (Kerouac sez in On the Road, which you knew from Fresno—old Bill Saroyan’s town—and who, BTW, was born here in Lowell, Kerouac, not Saroyan). On foot was the way to see all 3 towns.
I teased you about having thick ankles—“from taking ballet when I was little” you’d say. Then kick it right back to me—“Let’s go get some taa-cos and beeah”—yeah, like that was even close to a Boston accent. Smile.
There was that period when things were getting jangled w/ your boyfriend back in Fresno, and you said one day, in a kinda, I dunno, wistful way, “what we oughta do, let’s make a raft . . . and just float down the river, I hear Jasper is a really nice mellow town.”
Crazy, I know. You mighta been reading Huckleberry Finn, (Fuckleberry Hen I think Kesey said) thinking of the Mighty Miss’sip . . . Jasper was actually upriver on the Willamette, not a direction a raft can really float . . . But when you said it we laughed.
We never did, of course. Make a raft.
When I got back east, I gave up on college. Too distracting. I just wanted to paint, the way you were always wanting to work with your plants. Some of that musta rubbed off on me, BTW, because guess what? For a while I got into bottle gardens—self-contained mini-rain forests. Almaden bottles were good, soft green glass w/ fluid shapes & little loop handles; or sometimes, big chunky gallon jugs from Gallo mountain burgundy. The work was fussy—couldn’t do it right after drinking the wine—but some of those gardens lasted a long time. When my old lady & I split we agonized over who’d get the bottle gardens. I finally just said, “They’re yours.” What I didn’t know was that she also took a bunch of my favorite LPs. Say la vee. Thing about music and gardens is there’re always more. Life? Love? Mmm—I’m not so sure.
I hear from a mutual friend that you’ve had health problems. If you get this & write back you can tell me about that if you want, but I’m not prying, because, shit, I’m not any younger, and for sure not smarter. Last winter I got Covid pretty bad. Yeah. I know. Knucklehead didn’t get the shots. But I’m mostly recovered now, just a little fog in the noggin.
I’ve got a nice apartment—3 rooms is all I need. And my kids keep in touch. I’m a manager at UPS (did I say that?) and still painting, mostly watercolors. I sell a few at this gallery in an old mill building downtown. No velvet Elvis yet—saving that for my golden years. You still gardening?
Funny what sets the mind turning, isn’t it? A bridge?! I hope they fix this one like the city’s been talking for years, I don’t feel safe going across it.
Guess I’m starting to ramble here. Anyways, like I said, crossing one river got me thinking of another river & I found your old address (don’t even know if it’s still good) & I suppose what all rivers’ve got in common is flow . . . like time.
Yeah. Well . . . anyways. I do hope you’re well, Mary Lou. For real. Write me if you get this. If you want.
Love & peace, etc. Your friend, Simon
P.S. Sometimes (not gonna lie), I wonder where that raft trip might’ve led.
Street Hockey: The Martin Terrace Crew in Dracut, Mass.
RICK HARVEY
Street hockey was a very popular sport for us back in the 1970s. Of course, it was the Bobby Orr-era then. Most of us ate and slept Bruins hockey. I am not embarrassed to say it was the only time some of my friends and I shed tears when one of our Boston sports teams lost in a championship. Goalie Ken Dryden of the Montreal Canadiens stole the show, and as they said in those days “stood on his head.”
We had a special name for street hockey in our neighborhood. We called it “sheets of flame.” We would play for hours on end in the daytime and then after supper play under the streetlights until it was time to go in. Myself, Dave Paquin, Billy Simmons, Freddie Stec, Dave Bates, the Gariepy brothers Kenny and Brian, Dickie Eberhardt and finally our young star George Demetroulakos.
“Georgie” was quite younger than we were, but he loved playing with us, and he loved playing goalie. Honestly, his mom at times would get mad at us for the pounding he took, but he always came back for more. I say young star because Georgie went onto Northeastern University and became a starting goaltender for them. He backboned the team in net to win the 1980 Beanpot Tournament and he won the Eberly Award given to the goalie with tournament’s best save percentage. We always joked and took a bit of credit for the skills that Georgie had in net, skills he really learned as a young street hockey goalie.
We built a “regulation goal” out of wood and heavy twine. Dave and I practiced countless hours in his driveway, each taking turns playing goalie. We even practiced in his cellar when the weather was poor. We made homemade goalie pads and a stick pad and used a baseball glove for the goalie glove. We did use those “Mylec” hockey sticks with the plastic blades. I remember heating them over the electric stove to bend curves in them to help with the slap shots. We also used older wooden hockey sticks and taped the heck out of them with electrical tape so they would work better on the tar. We used the orange Mylec balls and pucks. But our favorite thing to use was a tennis ball.
Of course, playing games was the most fun. We would play amongst ourselves or invite other neighborhood teams to come over or we would even travel. One great place we would meet to play other teams was an outdoor basketball court behind the Dracut Middle School off Lakeview Ave. One side of the court was the brick wall of the gym. The other three were chain-link fencing with the green slats between the links. It was like having our own outdoor hockey arena. We played countless games against the Litchfield Street team.
Ronnie and Donnie Chandler, Wally Biedron, Wally Hudzik, and Johnny Tellier are a few names I recall. I remember those games being very competitive.
We rarely stayed indoors. We played all the sports in “pick-up” style, either in our neighborhood or down at the high school complex. I do feel sorry for the kids these days who probably do not even know what a pick-up game is. My friend Dave and I still see each other often. We still reminisce about our old neighborhood. The memories are so vivid, it seemed like they just happened yesterday. As they say, those were the good old days.
Green Beans
PAUL HUDON
Born in March 1939, I was old enough to memorize on the Victory Garden we planted at the side of our house on Gershom Avenue during the war. That would be the Second World War, the sum of all horizons between 1942 and 1945.
Not that I noticed. Civic space (Lowell) and global events (the war) were not of my world from ’42 to ’45. As with everyone, horizons were nowhere to be found in the first six years of my life. The documentaries I’ve watched about the Second World War have the same reality as what I learn from books about the Thirty Years’ War. But I do have real-time memories of our Victory Garden. I put that down to green beans.
There were other vegetables besides beans growing in our garden. There must have been. Carrots, peppers, some sort of squash crawling over the ground, or maybe those were cucumbers, and tomatoes. At least half a dozen tomato plants. Potatoes. And there must have been yellow as well as green beans because they were mémère’s favorite. Memory yields no lettuce. Salads were not a thing at our house.
Memory as a rule yields very little, probably because memory is mostly forgetting. We figure constellations by ignoring most stars, and we do the same with memories. Only with memory it’s places and what happens there, not stars, that make the choice set. Also, with constellations ignored stars remain in our field of vision, while discarded memories are gone, usually forever. Memory yields a fractured zodiac, scattershot remnants in a twodimensional space. On that we build bespoke mythologies.
I doubled in age, ’42 to ‘45. From age three to age six, the immediate surround became unresponsive. It made non-negotiable demands, demanded in fact that I be a different person. Quick change artist I was not. I remember bawling first time I was taken to Couture’s barber shop, next door to Lambert’s Market, and across from the Pawtucketville Social Club. Same thing happened my first day at school. Only this time someone was there to film it. Who in the Fall of ’44 had a movie camera at the ready at Jeanne d’Arc grade school is lost to history. But there I am, standing alone between two rows of incoming scholars, weeping at the horror of being there. The world has always been alien, far back as it goes with me.
There was a physicality to exploring the world in the ‘40s not available to youngsters born in the Worldwide Web. Getting place to place meant real-world displacement, usually on foot. My home on Gershom and the school on Fourth were on opposite sides of a hill, a hill hidden beneath streets and street names. I walked over that hill every school day until the Spring of ’52; but I didn’t see the hill until much later, several decades later, when I came back to it as an adult. White, Avon, Fourth, Mt Hope: four sides of the city block where church and school sat back-to-back, built into the slope on the far side.
Toujours à pieds
At the other end of Gershom, on Bodwell, was another hill, made entirely of sand. Jack Kerouac in his time called it Snake Hill, habitat of The Great World Snake, the place where ‘’the universe disposes of its own evil.’’ Prosaic us, we called it the “sandbank.” I find no trace of Dr Sax, the fabled anti-snake protagonist Jack said lives in the wood by Snake Hill; but I do remember one day being in that wood, under a blazing sun, and the buzz of insects in my ears. Alternate immediate surround. Offer of bilocation.
Places and what happens there.
I am looking at an old man in bed, the room is very small. Next yard over I see a mattress laid across clotheslines. Two visuals from my Victory Garden days. They come together where I meet up with the fact of death, but I don’t remember when.
A garden hose brings water from an outside tap to a pail where I mix horse manure in with the water. Engrais we call it. Slow moving horse drawn wagon on Gershom Avenue, and a ragman driving the horse.
We say ragman in English. Being raised by my grandparents I don’t often hear English spoken at home, none at all from them. At school, when I get there, I see a poster by the stairs, just to the left. I am instructed to Remember Pearl Harbor. At home there is mealtime in one language, and war talk on the radio in another. At no time am I confused by this. It is no more problematic than changing my shoes.
Bundles of newspapers are stacked by the curb, almost as tall as I am.
The church is crowded. High above my head the windows are dark. I walk this way and I walk that way, looking for a destination.
My grandfather is waist deep in a sandpit and hacks vigorously at the roots of a cherry tree. The cherry blossoms and the fruit are prized but the birds shit all over the laundry.
Girl cousins come from across the river and together we dig tunnels in a fresh snowfall that covers the whole of the backyard.
Like I say, a fractured zodiac.
Do memories age? When I put the question to neurology, I learn that they do, but more likely they shapeshift. It is in the nature of memories to reconstruct themselves.
Memories are made by changes in collections of neurons and the connections or synapses between them. A memory may be laid down in one group of neural circuits but recalled in another. Each time we recall a memory it may change depending on the neural circuits that are engaged at that particular moment.
At that particular moment. In the immediate surround. This will explain the spectral beans that regularly show up on market days, when the actual in-the-bin beans always disappoint. Sometimes they’ll offend. Which depends on where my mind is at that particular bean buying moment; but I always have a ready opinion, pass judgement, and they never measure up to my wartime beans. No living bean will find favor put next to ghost beans produced fresh on the spot on each occasion.
It is the nature of spectral beans that they are spectral. It’s a sad thing to realize, I have measured out my life with phantom beans, and I’ve been unfair with beans as they can’t help being in today’s world of commerce. It’s become a ritual, obeisance done to another place where some things may have happened. It’s a place built around a vegetable McMuffin. I have no recollection when this started. Nor do I remember the garden being dug up. Or why. Later, in my teen years, the area at the side of the house was covered by
lawn. For a time, there was even a lawn swing.
Où sont les fèves d’antan?
The house on Gershom Avenue passed out of the family twenty years ago. Only two blocks from North Campus, it has since been cut-up and refitted for student rentals. I drove by not long ago, slow riding between Bodwell and Sarah. There were cars parked where our Victory Garden was, and I think an above ground pool farther in, at the back of the property.
Evacuations
HENRI MARCHAND
Ienjoy spelunking through antique shops and salvage barns. You never know what you’ll find. It was in a dimly lit barn filled with ornate mantles, antique plumbing and thick, oversized doors, all displayed in a maze of organized disorder that I found a flashback item. I was rummaging around Architectural Salvage for some original door hardware. Among the bins of tarnished locksets and hinges, a burst of bright orange caught my eye. Closer inspection revealed a pile of instructional handbooks, published in 1977 by the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency.
Curious, I picked one up and as I thumbed its moldering pages, I was suddenly back in the days of “duck and cover,” when my heart skipped a beat every time jets passed overhead. It skipped again when I learned that the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency was absorbed by FEMA and is now part of the Department of Homeland Security.
If you thought evacuation and relief efforts in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina disastrous, imagine the bedlam in the event of a nuclear attack. But don’t worry. As outlined in the handbook, “Protection in the Nuclear Age” preparedness will enhance our chances of surviving Armageddon.
“Protection in the Nuclear Age” is at once an ominous, cheery and naïve little manual, balancing dire predictions that “millions of Americans would die if a nuclear attack should occur” with optimistic statistics, citing studies that show that tens of millions would survive.” It assures us that in the event of an attack, we “would not be alone.” The “entire Nation would be mobilizing to . . . hold down . . . loss of life” and “assistance would be available” from all levels of government with “effective emergency preparations and actions.”
This handy booklet assures us with near certainty that, like oncoming hurricanes, “incoming . . . missiles would be detected by networks of warning stations.” Some of us might have up to fifteen minutes warning, others nearly an hour. A variety of signals would alert us in the event of an actual emergency. These might be wavering, staccato blasts on “whistles, horns or other devices” indicating an attack has indeed occurred or a long, steady wail directing us to radio or TV broadcasts for further instructions.
If a fireball on the horizon is the first inkling that doom is on the way, expect a full “5-15 seconds before being seriously injured by the heat,” perhaps “15-60 seconds before the blast wave arrived.” Moving quickly is, of course, of grave importance, so “take cover instantly.” My guess is that many of us, anxious to share the news with friends, wouldn’t get past speed dial on our cell phones or onto our favorite social media ap. But, if you’ve read Chapter 2 and you’re the cool-headed type, there are short-term shelter options–sewers, caves and culverts. In a pinch, crawling under cars or heavy furniture will have to
do. Finding yourself out in the open with no other options, you are advised to “simply lie down on the ground and curl up.” My guess is that a fetal position would be the go to curl up. Should you survive, hustle over to a public fallout shelter after the heat and blast waves have passed. Unfortunately sturdy public shelters are rare these days what with church closings and new public buildings more gunite than granite.
This underscores the importance of preparation and personal responsibility. Chapter 3 has cool ideas for basement shelters, including one that doubles as a peacetime “snack bar”. For us slackers, clueless and facing a flurry of fallout, there’s always the first little pig option. Just dig a hole four feet deep and three wide and mound up the dirt one to two feet around the perimeter. Cover with a few solid doors, say a prayer and you’re good to go. If, like the smart little pig, you want a Four Star shelter impervious to either wolf breath or Bear missiles, plans are available.
Don’t have a nuclear hardened bunker? Evacuation before an attack is the key to your survival. Chapter 7, “The Relocation Option”, is where the reality of Katrina collides with bureaucratic best laid plans. Assuring us that agencies are “planning for the orderly relocation of people in time of . . . crisis” the chapter outlines steps to take before boarding evacuation buses or driving to our assigned “reception area.”
Granted, this amusing booklet is a bit dated, printed before the Blizzard of ’78, but imagine you’re in a high-risk zone and have been warned that bombs are on the way. If not channel surfing for the best live coverage from ground zero and the latest fallout forecasts, your first task is to secure ample supplies of prescriptions and special foods. Sure. With eight inches of snow forecast stores become gridlocked, panicked shoppers suddenly driven to a feeding frenzy and the realization that they have no shovel.
If you plan to evacuate by car, don’t forget to stop for gas. And, in addition to “shovels, picks, hammers, and work gloves” be sure to pack clothing, bedding, food, utensils, water, flashlights, soap, detergent, towels, a garbage can, an emergency toilet, and medical supplies. Oddly, there is no mention of pets.
After reading through this quaint little guidebook, which I thought a bargain at $5, I considered buying a couple of antique doors to have at the ready should I need to quickly improvise a snug shelter. Upon closer inspection, however, I abandoned that idea. The doors were thick with layers of lead paint which studies have shown to be dangerous stuff.
So if the sirens ever wail, I’ll just scamper down the nearest manhole and hold my nose until the whole dustup blows over.
“The Patriotism of the Franco-Americans” (1)
Reprinted from L’Étoile, a French-language newspaper with offices in Lowell, Mass. (9/12/1917)
TRANSLATED BY LOUISE PELOQUIN
“Miss Yvonne Lemaître, distinguished woman of letters, published a very interesting piece in Boston’s Transcript the other day. ‘Why François fails to fight’ is an analysis, or rather a review, of the recent events, in Canada as well as in New England’s Franco-American centers, since enlistment began in the two countries.
“After having observed . . . that French-Canadians are enlisted in the United States and the exact opposite in the province of Québec, Miss Lemaître made the effort to obtain information from the exemption bureau. She observed that Franco-Americans had not even waited for the establishment of obligatory military service to enroll in great number under the Stars and Stripes. And since then, they have eagerly responded to the President’s call. According to the examination bureau official reports, Franco-Americans who enlisted asked for exemption less than did members of any other ethnic group.
“Miss Lemaître, who took Lowell’s French-language population as a typical example, noticed that we still love France, but that England leaves us cold. She says that FrancoAmerican youth are hardly interested in things from Canada. Their elders, who still receive the Presse and the Patrie (2) newspapers, attentively follow the events for which they have a passion almost as much as when they lived on the banks of the Saint Lawrence.
“Assimilation among United States French-Canadians takes place in steps, with the two extremes, complete assimilation, and the ‘hyphen’ in everything with all of its ‘foreigner’ connotation. Between these two opposite poles, exists a wide range.
“Miss Lemaître claims that Franco-American youth born in the United States only read American newspapers. What she means by that, we do not know. Are ‘American newspapers’ only the English-language ones? We tend to think that she was referring to newspapers published in the United States and written either in French or in English. In any case, she is convinced that Americanization is under way in Franco-American centers. She writes, speaking of Franco-American youth: (3) ‘It has a much larger number who read only American papers, young people born in “les États” (4) and who insist that they are Americans first last and all the time.’
“Miss Lemaître goes so far as to say that that these young Franco-Americans, Uncle Sam’s adopted sons, are more American that Washington, as the French were ‘more royalist than the king’ and Catholics ‘more orthodox than the Pope.’ She says, a longer period of time was necessary for French-Canadians to arrive at that point than for the Irish,
probably because of the language difference and because of the strong French-Canadian attachment to their own schools. But it is obvious that the French-Canadian youth have indeed reached a degree of Americanization and have been called to become a factor (over-energizing factor) (5) in the political and general progress of the Franco-American community in the United States.
“Volunteering and the enlistment have taken a considerable number of FrenchCanadians from New England due to the group’s high birth rate which remains an honor and differentiates them from their ‘cousins from France.’ (6) Given the large number of children in each family, military-age men are numerous. A single Lowell family has five enlisted brothers, aged twenty-one, twenty-three, twenty-five, twenty-seven and twentynine respectively. And it is fitting to say that not one brought up reasons for exemption. Another family has four military-age sons, and six other families have three. Eight FrancoAmerican families provided the extraordinary number of twenty-seven men.
“A remarkable number of Lowell’s young Franco-Americans are enrolled in the army, the navy and the National Guard . . . One National Guard officer expressed himself in these terms: ‘Young Franco-Americans have always been a good addition to the National Guard.’ The young Franco-Americans’ response to the call to arms has been striking.
“Despite the fact that a considerable number were kept home due to family responsibilities, many enrolled in different army corps . . . One recruiting officer in Lowell, who had been in charge of enrollment in various other New England cities, showed me a page from his register, on which fifteen of the thirty names were French. He pointed out that young Franco-Americans showed proof of the same eagerness everywhere else. This page was perhaps an exception: but not a single page was found without many French names.
“The six National Guard companies of Lowell counted one quarter Franco-Americans when they were mobilized . . . One company of railway engineer reserves, made up of one hundred and sixty men presently constructing railways in France, was organized by a Lowell Franco-American looking for recruits among his compatriots. They responded in great number. This Franco-American is the company captain.
“One company of the State Guard is exclusively made up of ‘French boys’ (6) whose captain is also one. They are over 31 years old and, because of their family obligations, would not have been accepted in the regular army. Some Franco-Americans received their officer’s certificates after following courses in Plattsburg, N.Y.
“In short, this part of Miss Lemaître’s study on the patriotism of Franco-Americans was summarized in the Globe of Boston and has made the rounds of the French-language press in the United States.”
Notes
1. L’Étoile article translated by Louise Peloquin whose grandfather, Louis-A. Biron (18611947), headed the publication for 37 years, from 1910 to his death, making him the longest-lasting editor and proprietor of a French-language New England newspaper.
2. Quotation in English in the article.
3. The States.
4. “Over-energizing factor” is between parentheses in the article.
5. Between quotation marks in the article.
6. In English and between quotation marks in the article.
About Yvonne Lemaître (1876-1954)
Born in Pierreville, Québec, Yvonne Lemaître came to the United States at the age of ten when her father, Joseph Lemaître, left Canada to open a medical practice in Lowell, Mass. She attended public schools, and her education was exclusively in English.
Lemaître claimed she wrote mediocre French. Her polished pieces prove the contrary. She had the talent and the rare merit to teach herself the language and came to master all of its stylistic difficulties. She said she owed her linguistic prowess to reading and studying the best French authors. Her proficiency in both French and in English served her well during her career.
Her debut in journalism took place at L’Etoile in 1902. Her widely appreciated chronicles were often reproduced in other newspapers.
In 1904, she joined the editorial staff of Lowell’s Courier-Citizen
In 1905, she traveled to Europe and sojourned in Paris for some time. She also travelled through Germany and Holland. While abroad, she sent accounts of her experiences to the Courier-Citizen.
In 1908, she visited England and Scotland and sent her travel memoirs to the same newspaper. Upon her return, she started writing French pieces again.
After seven years at the service of the Courier-Citizen, she resigned to focus on writing English literary reviews and analyses for publications including the New Yorker and the Smart Set, whose contributors included F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Sinclair Lewis. In May 1911, she settled in Paris as correspondent for large American newspapers such as the Boston Transcript.
When she left the City of Lights, Lemaître was widely appreciated as a newspaper woman and writer. Lowell’s Sunday Telegram published the following about her:
“In the departure of Yvonne Lemaître for the field of foreign labor, Lowell’s journalism loses its most brilliant light.”
Phillip Marden, editor-in-chief of the Courier-Citizen, wrote: “The readers of the CourierCitizen, as well as the newspaper’s personnel, will have reason to regret the departure of Miss Yvonne Lemaître. Miss Lemaître, who intends to settle in Paris, was a regular collaborator in our columns for many years, firstly in charge of Franco-American news then contributing many captivating articles on French literature and on topics of art. It is a pleasure to recognize the editors’ appreciation for her admirable work—an appreciation wholly shared by all of the readers of the Courier-Citizen.”
One further Lowell note: In 1950, late in her career, writing for the French language newspaper in Worcester, Mass., Le Travailleur, Yvonne Lemaître reviewed the first novel by Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City. She praised the book but chided him for not being out front with his ethnic identity. The family at the center of the story is named Martin, which could be French, English, Irish, or Portuguese. In response to her, he wrote that he would “never hide [his identity] again.”
Blessings
EMILIE-NOELLE PROVOST
My husband, Rob, and I moved to Lowell nearly twenty-four years ago with our then eleven-month-old daughter. For the previous four years, we’d been living in a rural area of western Massachusetts. The nearest grocery store was fifteen miles away. We liked it there, but once our daughter, Madelaine, was born we quickly decided that raising her in such a remote place, a few hours’ drive from either of our families, was not what we wanted.
To be closer to my mother, who lived in Chelmsford, we decided to move to Lowell. We didn’t know much about the city at the time, but I liked it right away. I grew up on the Boston line in an urban neighborhood and the part of Lowell where our first house was, Christian Hill, felt like home to me in a way that our pastoral enclave in western Massachusetts never had.
I also liked that Lowell was very ethnically and culturally diverse. It was the main reason that, after being in the city for less than a year, Rob and I decided Lowell would be a good place for Madelaine to grow up.
When Madelaine was younger, we spent a lot of time in Lowell’s downtown, driving her back and forth to school, eating at restaurants, and going to events. But after she graduated from Lowell High School and began attending college in Worcester, we didn’t get down there as often. During and after the COVID-19 lockdown, we rarely interacted with anyone from Lowell at all.
After being confined to our own neighborhood for so long, many of the reasons I liked Lowell seemed to fade into the background, especially its people.
But this past January, a few days before my birthday, I went to a Lowell nail salon to get a manicure. It was something I hadn’t done since 2019.
“Yesterday was my birthday,” the nail tech said when I sat down at her table.
“Happy birthday,” I said. “My birthday is this week, too.”
“What day?” Her Vietnamese accent made the question hard to understand. “The eleventh,” I said finally.
“That’s the day before my husband’s birthday,” she said as she filed the nails on my right hand. “It’s a blessing to have your birthday at the beginning of the year. All your life, you get to have two new beginnings at the same time.”
I’d never thought of my birthday, or anyone’s, as being a new beginning. I’d always thought of birthdays as mile markers, evidence that one is inching closer to the end of the road.
“I had dinner at Texas Roadhouse on my birthday,” she said without pausing. “I love Texas Roadhouse. It’s my favorite restaurant. I always get a small slice of cheesecake. Cheesecake is so good.”
“It is good,” I said.
“My husband had never been to Texas Roadhouse. It was his first time.” She shook her head in disbelief. “I said to him, ‘How long have you been in this country, and you have not been to Texas Roadhouse?’”
I imagined Texas Roadhouse full of customers from Southeast Asia. The thought made me smile.
“So, my husband said to me, ‘Maybe you like Texas Roadhouse because you are from the country.’” She laughed, and I took this to mean that he had been teasing her about being a hick. I laughed, too.
“When we got back from Texas Roadhouse, my cousin was at my house,” she said. “I thought he was coming to wish me a happy birthday, but then he tells me my other cousin’s wife died. On my birthday he tells me this! He says she went to bed and didn’t wake up in the morning. She was just forty.”
I wasn’t sure how to reply to this, but then she said, “We know the day we are born, but we don’t know the day we die. Life is a blessing. We have to enjoy every day. You have to talk to all the people you meet. Find out about their lives. Make the most of it. Life is too short!”
Although I’d never met her before, I started to feel like I’d known this woman for years. It had been ages since I’d had a conversation with someone I’d just met, especially someone who, on the surface at least, seemed so different than I am.
“Do you go outside?” she asked.
“Outside?”
“Yes, I walk every night when I get home from work. My husband says it is too cold, but I don’t care. I like to be outside. Tonight is the full moon. It’s cloudy, but maybe I will see it. But even if I don’t, the moon will still be beautiful tomorrow.”
Then she said, “Our waitress at Texas Roadhouse is going to Hawaii for vacation.”
“I haven’t been there,” I told her. “The flight is so long. I’ve never wanted to go.”
“I have not been there either. But I fly back to my country and it takes a long time. Almost two days. I have three brothers in Vietnam. They are all married and have kids. When I go, I have to rent a van so everyone can fit. I stay for three weeks. I pay for everything. It costs a lot of money, so I don’t go often.”
When I didn’t say anything, she continued. “Soon it is my nephew’s birthday. I send my brother money to buy him a cake and a gift. I am blessed.”
It occurred to me then that she was most likely supporting three families besides her own with the income she earned at the salon. Most Americans I know wouldn’t think of it as a blessing.
“Thank you,” I said, looking at my nails after she had finished. They were shiny and pale pink and looked nicer than they had at any time in recent memory.
“What will you do for your birthday?” she asked as I handed her my credit card.
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “I haven’t really thought about it.”
“My husband wants to go to Texas Roadhouse for his birthday. He loved it so much,” she said. “So, I told him, “Maybe you are from the country?”
I haven’t seen her since that morning, but I still smile when I think about that nail tech. In less than an hour, her sparkling sense of humor and joyful personality reminded me of the reasons I’ve lived in this city for nearly half my life. If we’re willing to stop and pay attention, blessings are everywhere.
“Young Goodman Brown” in a Twenty-First Century America
CHRISTINE O’CONNOR
In the late 1980s, somewhere between the writings of Emerson and Melville, I came upon “Young Goodman Brown,” a short story on Professor Zaitchik’s syllabus of Early American Literature. It’s been many years since I read it, but as of late it kept coming to mind. Vague recollections of Goodman, alone in the wilderness trying to find his way, tugged at me. So, I pulled out my thick, hard-covered copy of The Selected Writings of Nathanial Hawthorne and flipped through until I found it.
I had forgotten much of it, including that it’s an allegory. The story begins with Goodman journeying into the woods and leaving his wife, Faith, behind. It’s nighttime, and these are not the woods of Frost: lovely, dark and deep; they are only dark. Here, the gloomiest trees barely stand aside “to let the narrow path . . . through.” There is a creepiness to this story that Stephen King has called one of the top-ten of all-time.
Walking along the path, Goodman fears a “devilish Indian” behind every tree, until he meets a Stranger who looks so like himself they could be mistaken for father and son. The Stranger scolds Goodman for being late and, in my favorite line of the story, he replies: “Faith kept me back awhile.” Soon Goodman discovers that the Stranger knew his father and grandfather, and that they too had walked this path:
“I helped your grandfather when he lashed the Quaker woman, . . . through the streets of Salem, and it was I that brought your father the pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to the Indian village in King Philip’s war. They were my good friends . . . The deacons of many churches have drunk the communion wine with me; the selectmen of towns make me their chairman; the majority of the Great and General Court are firm supporters of my interest.”
It turned out that this man with the black staff, and “an indescribable air of one who knew the world,” was no stranger to Goodman, or to any man, for the Stranger was “all that is wicked in [the] heart” of everyman.
As I finished the story, I thought of Professor Zaitchik standing there with one hand in his pocket, dressed in an olive-green, crew neck sweater (he’s always wearing it when I think of him).
“Hey kiddo, why so glum?” he says.
“I know now why I’ve been thinking of this story,” I say.
“Why’s that?”
“Because I think America is like young Goodman Brown. We’ve lost our way. We’re traveling through a wilderness, guided by a man we really don’t know, but we feel we’ve met
before. Every day we get closer to this dark, uncomfortable place; a place not governed by justice, a place outside of the bounds of decency, civility, and society. It’s where Christians are self-professed; where we fear those who are different; and where faith in humanity is lost. Here, there is no truth, just mirages the size of oceans.”
“I’m glad to know you were listening all those years ago, cause sometimes you could have fooled me,” he says.
“But what’s going to happen? Goodman was never the same again. No hopeful message was ever carved onto his grave.”
“Look kiddo, this isn’t the only story out there.”
“Whattaya mean?”
“This is a course in Early American Literature, right?”
“Yah.”
“Well, go back to how we started.”
“The Puritans?”
“You remembered them. Good. Now, who am I thinking of?”
“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Johnathan Edwards?”
“Good one, but no.”
“Cotton Mather?”
Zaitchik shakes his head.
“Anne Bradstreet?”
No.
“I give up.”
“Does John Winthrop ring any bells?”
“Oh yah, he’s ‘the city on a hill’ guy.”
“Yes. ‘And we shall be, as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.’ That’s the dream and we have to keep at it. We’ll always have ups and downs, highs and lows, good times and bad. Our ancestors have been through worse.”
Nodding, I thought of my own Russian-Jewish grandmother, Sally, and how by coming to America her family escaped those unspeakable events of modern history.
“So,” he continued “we’re not great right now. That’s happened before. But we can never give up on those founding declarations we set in motion, even when we fail to fulfill them.”
“Thanks, Joe.”
“For what?”
“Faith.”
“Hey, next week read Thoreau’s essay on Civil Disobedience, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the part about resist much, obey little, and look for me. I’ll be the guy in the olivegreen sweater.”
A Lowell Evolution
STEPHEN O’CONNOR
Ican’t wait to get the fuck out of Lowell.”
How many times did I hear those words spoken in the smoke-filled bars of my youth?
How many times did I say them myself?
Even then I saw the setting sun that spread roses in the vacant windows of the red brick mills, the gray stone clock tower of City Hall reaching upward into the blue of mid-day, a vastness from which a golden eagle descends with spread wings to alight at the tower’s apex, the cobbled streets that rattled our rusted cars, the sluggish canals that disappeared mysteriously through granite archways under the long factory floors, once turning giant turbines that sent power through gears and belts, shaking endless rows of looms into clanking life.
All the things that speak to me so deeply now, were, in those days, merely the tired artifacts of a run-down mill town, an archeology not worth digging up; an old hag that rumor whispered had once been a beauty courted by presidents, celebrities and writers, but now, like Depot Annie, just a madwoman rambling past empty store fronts, kicking at wind-swept garbage and roaring obscene invective at passers-by.
None of us knew or cared much about the city’s history—we only knew the story we lived. The drinking age was eighteen. It was a city of cheap bars where a pool game or an insult or disagreement could lead to a brawl; where the Hells Angels had settled into derelict tenements from which they sold drugs and sometimes guns; where I overheard a down and out heroin addict on Merrimack Street say to her equally forlorn friend, “Lowell sucks! The fuckn’ bars open at 7:00!” Where the drunks filed into a Gorham Street business to watch peep shows in dark booths that smelled of whiskey and human effluvium; where nothing good happened after midnight, and not much good happened before.
It was the seventies, and we all blamed the old hag of a city for the sordidness of our lives. We sang along with Eric Burden, “We gotta get outa this place!” That was the mantra of our drunken ashram, our cri de guerre, the chief tenet of our simple philosophy. Get the fuck out. There’s a place that’s better than this.
Many of us got out, some to college and then later, to various places around the country or the world. One wild friend was given the old option by the judge: jail or the Service. He spent the next twenty-five years ploughing the seas on a destroyer. Some never left, and too many—the ones who got deep into booze and drugs—died. Heroin, barbiturates, amphetamines, and coke—they don’t lend the user longevity. Especially the ones who shoot the drugs. At forty they were old, and soon they were buried in the town they had
so often sworn they’d leave. Looking back, it wasn’t the town that killed them so much as the time. It was “The Eve of Destruction,” when Jim Morrison sang of my only friend, the end. “Born to Be Wild” was on the radio and the juke box, and Hendrix sang the haunting refrain: If I don’t see you no more in this world, I’ll see you in the next one, and don’t be late. It’s a funny thing, how time changes a place, and how it changes us. I ended up going to school in western Mass., then in Ireland, working there and later in France, with a lumberjack, then in a garage putting snow tires on cars, and in the late summer, harvesting grapes in the rolling green hills of the Beaujolais region. Sometimes, in the evenings, the workers would talk about the places they were from. I’d tell them about Depot Annie, and about Nip, arrested for drunkenness three nights in a row, Phil, who brought his future wife to a shootout with the Hells Angels on their first date, Kingston the cabbie, who, at the Highland Tap, took a billiard ball square in the forehead and never flinched, Tommy, who challenged the entire Celebrity Lounge to step outside, Billy, who told a judge he never did drugs and was asked why then he had a home-made tattoo on his forearm that said TUINAL, Bobby, whose dog was hit by a train, after which he laughed and threw the dog’s head in the river, Blackie, and the desperate act that won him respect in jail, Jimmy, who used to get drunk at the Tap and shout, “You think I’m crazy? Of course I’m crazy! I was twenty years old they threw me out of a fuck’ airplane in Normandy with tracer bullets whizzin’ by me—and into me! Look at this!” He’d pull up his shirt to show scars of slits and punctures. “Don’t you think I should be crazy?”
I concluded these tales with the comment, “Well, you must know people like that in your home-town.” Inevitably, the workers would shake their heads and say, “We don’t know any people like that.” And in my memory, the old hag of Lowell became something else, more beautiful, in the way that the Sean Van Vocht, the poor old woman of Irish mythology may become the lovely Cathleen Ní Houlihan, with “the walk of a queen.”
For me, the hag of Lowell began to wear the dignity of the worker, the pride of the battered fighter who would not go down, with all the endurance of the tireless machines in her red-brick belly. Later, when I told an old friend that I’d like to write about the people of Lowell—our people—he replied, “What will you call it? A Sewer Runs Through It?” He had gotten out of Lowell and saw no reason to look back. I laughed and didn’t try to change his mind. Every person who has lived in a city has a different version of that city in his or her heart.
I returned to Lowell after years away and saw it in a new light. The city had changed; I had changed; I no longer spent so much time in bars, and the bars were less gritty and more genial as the university expanded. The establishment of a National Park sparked a rehabilitation of historic buildings. The old characters faded. Depot Annie was gone. Poor old Ding Ding did not shadow box on corners. The gruff and seemingly eternal Arthur did not pour sudsy fifty-cent drafts and push a damp rag over the long mahogany bar at the Old Worthen. Officer Tiny Muldoon was no longer on the force, laying down the law and reminding tough guys that they were not as tough as he was. The strip joints were gone. The Three Copper Men, the Celebrity Lounge and Nicky’s where Jack Kerouac once recited Shakespeare. I watched the businesses change and bloom with new ethnicities, their signs in foreign alphabets, all around me the sounds of languages I never heard in my youth. So many different Lowells.
My wife, an immigrant herself, urges me to take her elsewhere, just for a change. Long
ago, she left the city of her youth in Colombia. I understand her feelings, and, as an Irish relative used to say, “A change is as good as a rest.” Still, it’s hard for me now to think about leaving. Three of my grandparents came from Ireland to this city. The fourth, my mother’s mother, was born in Lowell, but her parents, Daniel and Elizabeth Powers, immigrated from Ireland.
A while back, a cousin sent me Daniel Powers’ obituary. He was “stricken while driving a team of horses at the intersection of Merrimack and Suffolk Streets, and carried to his home on Fletcher Street, where he died.” I park my car by Excel Liquors and walk to the intersection. Looking up, I see the spire of St. Patrick’s Church and wonder if he saw it as he lay there. How many times had I passed this way, never knowing the connection it held to my blood? How many other places do we pass every day, we who have roots in one place, never knowing the scenes that were acted out in the lives, and maybe the deaths, of our forebears. Here are the homes and landmarks in the backgrounds of the old black and white photos. This was the house on Fletcher Street where Daniel Powers was brought to die—the house where now, a Buddha with folded hands contemplates a garden.
There at the corner of Fletcher and Broadway, my grandfather materializes, as I recall him one day. It must have been 1974 or 1975 as I drove along Broadway. There was John O’Connor, as large as life, standing in the sun on the corner with his straw hat cocked, no doubt fresh from Cuckoo O’Connell’s Bar, twirling his cane and smiling broadly, a Prince of the Acre surveying his domain. I pulled into Anton’s Cleaners’ parking lot and walked up to him. “Shhteeephen!” he cried. “Have you the machine?” That was his way of asking if I was driving.
Much of the conversation we had is blurred, now. But I remember that I found it—I don’t know the word—curious, amazing, strange, odd—that I was here in this time and place because this Irishman, and my other grandparents had boarded a vessel long ago, crossed the Atlantic, and come here, to Lowell, with nothing but a single suitcase and a lot of hope.
I asked him if he missed Ireland. “Ah,” he said. “I’ll never forget dear old Ireland, Stephen. But I’m so proud to be an American. America is the best country in the world.” He spread out his arms as if to encompass the entire country, but to him, really, America was the Acre, with its Irish and Greeks and Hispanics. It was Lowell, with its French Canadians and Poles and Africans. It was the city where he and my grandmother had bought a home and raised eight children on a house painter’s pay. America, the young country that had already done what Ireland could never manage—to drive out the Redcoats and give the King a black eye.
I stopped at the city library recently, a great castle of stone, and on the way back to my car, I heard two guys sitting on a bench on Shattuck Street. I paused to read a plaque, but really to listen. “She was playin’ up at Motorcycle Night on the rivah. She had a cowboy hat pulled low, ya know? An’ a leathah fringe jacket. So, I couldn’t see her too good. Damn, that chick could play! She sounded like fuckn’ Duane Allman.”
“Shut the fuck up!”
“I’m tellin’ ya!”
“How old washe?”
“She had the cowboy hat pulled down, so I coun’ tell, but what I seen, maybe late twenties, early thirties. Young. Hell, everybody looks young to me now—I’m sixty-six.”
“No shit. The cops look like kids.”
“Playin’ the livin’ shit outa that guitah.”
I’ve travelled around a bit, met all kinds of people. But here I am by a cobbled street, the sun is baking the timeless bricks and granite, and nearby the canal still flows. The people flow through the city, too. There are six billion people in the world, they say, and thousands of languages, but I could sit beside these two on the bench with no introduction and join the conversation. We would understand each other perfectly, every inflection, every nuance, every reference.
Van Morrison sang in “Irish Heartbeat,” “I’m goin’ back to my own ones.” For better or worse, these are my own ones. I couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of Lowell, but over these long decades, the city I once reviled has got into my blood. I could no more escape it than I could escape my own body, and where I go, it will go with me.
The Poison Game
JOSHUA SHAPIRO
One day after school, Davey and his friend Eugene were walking along the tracks that ran along the Merrimack River. For most of a mile they didn’t talk. Then, as if picking up a conversation they had been in the middle of, Davey said, “Arsenic.”
“That’s totally obvious, Isaacs. Plus you used it last time.”
“It’s a new day so it’s a new game. You name one, Stein.”
“Drano.”
“Drano’s not a real poison.”
“Define poison,” said Eugene Stein.
“Do I look like a dictionary?” said Davey.
“No, but you sound like one lately.”
“I’ve been working on my vocabulary.”
“According to you, Isaacs. I bet you don’t even know what poison actually is.”
Davey knew that poison was something Jews spoke of—if they spoke of it at all—with an almost tragic respect. But he couldn’t remember why, and right then poison was just fun, the way they sometimes had fun with the names of baseball players.
“It’s something you swallow that can kill you,” Davey said with authority. But even as he did he saw the problem with the definition. He hoped Eugene would not, but of course he did. Eugene was one of the smartest kids at school, maybe the smartest. He was one reason Davey was determined to improve his vocabulary.
“That’s just dumb, Isaacs. You ever hear of a gas chamber?”
Embarrassed and flailing, Davey said, “I know more about poison than you ever will, Stein.”
“Prove it.”
“Strychnine.”
“Mercury.”
The game was on. To stall for time, Davey stopped to break off one of the reeds that grew from the unused rail bed. The tracks were a spur that used to be so busy you could take a train to Gloucester in the morning, cool off at the beach, and ride home the same day. Davey’s father had explained all this to him, and more besides: according to Mr. Isaacs, there was a time when people used railroads the way they now used highways, and in the depot on Middlesex Street there was a lunch counter. Mr. Isaacs would get a faraway look when he talked about this, as if those had been better times. Davey didn’t understand this at all, since his father had also explained how there were signs back then in hotels and restaurants that said RESTRICTED. This meant no Jews.
“Are you playing or not, Isaacs?”
Davey realized he’d been daydreaming. In his distracted state the only poison he could think of was one he’d been saving, a special poison, one his friend couldn’t possibly know. But he had no choice.
“Hemlock,” said Davey.
“Hemlock?” said Eugene.
“Everyone knows that, Stein.” Everyone didn’t know it, since it came from a play neither Davey nor any kid he knew had ever read. But Mrs. Isaacs read Hamlet—she read it over and over—and she liked to tell Davey how in the play someone committed murder by pouring hemlock into the victim’s ear.
“It’s in Shakespeare,” he said proudly. Which silenced his friend but only temporarily.
“Thallium,” said Eugene.
Now it was Davey’s turn to feel stupid. He wondered if Eugene had a book, which as far as Davey was concerned would be cheating. Well, he could get a book, too. There was a library at school but Davey doubted they would have a book about anything as interesting as poison. There was a smaller library in the synagogue, on the upper floor where classes were held, but the only person he had ever seen go in the room was the principal, Dr. Levi. Davey walked slower. Eugene, short-legged and chubby, was breathing hard, but that wasn’t why Davey slowed down. They would be late for shul, but that wasn’t the reason either. Davey simply wanted to make the fun last, the fun even of losing. The fun of being with Eugene Stein, who said things like “totally obvious.” The thrill was not in the words themselves but in the way he said them, a smart sort of sneer. But really the fun went deeper, to an idea. The idea was that the two of them had something special—knowledge, kinship, a connection of spirits—that no one else in the world had, not the way they did.
For inspiration Davey looked around, but he saw nothing interesting. He knew the building yard they were passing where cement blocks were stacked in the grass. He knew the spot near a rusted switch in the tracks where the barbed wire was missing from the fence and you could climb over. He knew particular weeds and when they flowered and when they died. He knew when there was something unusual in the weeds—and there was, just beyond the fence before the tracks crossed Andover Street. It was a big kid sitting on a tree stump, smoking.
They turned down Andover in the direction of the synagogue, both of them walking faster now. Eugene had quickened the pace, despite breathing harder than ever.
“You heard him?” Davey asked. The question was unnecessary; the kid on the stump had spoken clearly.
“I basically just ignore him,” said Eugene.
“He was left back in first grade, you know.”
“I heard first and third. Ehrets is a moron.”
“I believe it,” Davey said. “He’s too big for sixth.”
“He looks like he should be in high school. Smokes like it, too.”
The glow of the cigarette was what had attracted Davey’s attention. The instant their eyes met, the kid named Eddie Ehrets had said, “The two Jew boys.”
Eugene, walking faster than Davey had ever seen him move, looked over his shoulder a few times. Davey refused to do that. He was determined to stand up for them by this small proud act, for what they believed in. Not their faith; the insult was annoying but no more so than all the insults that came casually and not infrequently from kids and the occasional
adult. Those he was used to. Davey was fighting for something more basic: the right to walk the streets of their town feeling free and happy and, yes, a little bit special. Eddie Ehrets, with whom Davey had shared maybe five words once on a playground, obviously didn’t think they were special. More than anything, Davey’s anger came from what this dumb overgrown kid, with nothing better to do than sit in the weeds smoking, had done to Davey’s current best friend. Eugene Stein had been turned in a moment from confident and clever to a small terrified boy waddling as fast as he could along a broken sidewalk.
A few blocks before their destination they stopped in front of Bouchard’s Variety Store. Eugene insisted they go inside, but Davey urged them on. Bouchard’s Variety, he knew too well, was an evil place. Also a foul and shabby one. FOUNTAIN CIGARS CANDY STATIONERY said flaking gold letters on the filthy glass. Stained curtains hung limp in the second story windows. He had been inside, but not in a year, and not ever again. Because Mr. Bouchard, intentionally or not, actually sold poison.
*
“Cyanide,” Davey whispered.
They were sitting now in the last row of the classroom. Dr. Levi, the ring of scalp around his yarmulke glistening, wrote at the blackboard.
“That’s in bad taste, Isaacs,” Eugene whispered back.
“Why? It’s a perfectly good poison.” For some reason it had come to him, maybe because he’d been thinking of Bouchard’s Variety, of the chipped counter and the spigots behind it that pumped poison from nickel spouts. He had once been made sick—so sick that he remembered wondering if a person could die from puking—by something in a root beer float.
“Cyanide?” Eugene said. “In a synagogue?”
“So?”
“Totally obvious.” The sneer was soft but it was back; the threat called Eddie Ehrets was behind them, forgotten for another day.
Dr. Levi’s bald head turned and the two boys went silent. The lesson was about Abraham. Usually Davey’s attention wandered during these Old Testament stories but this one kept his interest despite the asides with Eugene. The story was how Abraham, the founder of their faith, was commanded by God to kill his son Isaac. Davey Isaacs, the first-born in his family, would according to Jewish tradition be the sacrifice. He imagined his father standing over him with the big kitchen knife.
When the bald head with its shiny ring turned away, Eugene whispered, “You know what Nazis are?”
“Of course I know what Nazis are.” Images of his own father holding the knife mingled with characters from a TV show about a German prison camp. Davey didn’t much like Hogan’s Heroes, but they only got three channels and for half an hour every afternoon it was the only thing on.
“Then you know they killed Jews, right?”
“I’m not some idiot.” Davey heard himself talking loudly. He waited for Dr. Levi to turn his severe face on them. When he didn’t, Davey added, “Like Eddie Ehrets.”
“Ehrets is a German name,” Eugene said.
“Ehrets is a Nazi,” said Davey.
The boys giggled—they couldn’t help themselves—and this time Dr. Levi turned. Their
teacher was not old, no older than Davey’s father. His face was round and flat, not like some of the angular men’s faces you would see at shabbat services. He had a trace of a foreign accent; otherwise he spoke English with perfect precision. He was fluent in Hebrew and, it was said, several other languages. Davey didn’t dislike the man as much as fear him. Now here was Dr. Levi looking right at the two of them, the only boys in the class.
*
“Your father is a teacher, isn’t that right, David?”
“He’s a history teacher. My mother’s a teacher too.”
“Is she indeed?”
“A student teacher. She’s goes to college.” For some reason Davey was more proud of what his mother would be doing than the work his father had always done. “She goes to the state college in Salem and will be a real teacher next year.”
This information produced a look of disapproval on the principal’s round face. Then the expression passed, or was willed away, and he said, “We are in the Old World no longer.”
“I thought the world was billions of years old, Dr. Levi.”
This time the teacher smiled. “I don’t know your mother well, but I’m sure she’s a very intelligent woman. Do you know how I know, David?”
“How?”
“Because she has such an intelligent son.”
Davey didn’t know whether or not to say thank you. He didn’t know what to say. They were alone in Dr. Levi’s tiny office, the smallest of the several rooms above the sanctuary. Class was over and the building was quiet. Eugene had left, walking the single block to his father’s store, which sold and repaired shoes. The girls in the class had run shrieking down the stairs to waiting cars. Dr. Levi asked Davey how he usually got home.
“Up the Lawrence Street hill, then down Andover—”
A small fleshy palm stopped him. “So you walk, David.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Would you please call home and tell them you will be late?”
In the silence of the tiny room Davey could hear more clearly the slight accent. Valk instead of walk, vould instead of would. Almost how his grandmother, his father’s mother, talked. But Grandma Freyda, who had grown up in Russia, never went to school and couldn’t read or write. This teacher, who was also a doctor and a rabbi, sat before a wall of books with titles on the spines in English, Hebrew, and at least two other languages that Davey didn’t recognize. Now Dr. Levi turned his desk phone around.
Davey was certain his mother or father would ask to talk the principal, and his humiliation would be complete. He resigned himself to it. But his brother answered and their conversation went: “Sam, tell Mom I’m still at shul.” “Okay.” “Bye.”
Across the desk Dr. Levi was looking strangely at him. When he didn’t say anything, Davey asked, “How come I’m in trouble and Eugene isn’t?”
“Who said you’re in trouble, David?”
“I’m not?”
The round head shook slowly from side to side. “Your only problem seems to me to be innocence, like all the children in this fortunate land. I did not have the luxury of innocence. You are eleven?”
“I’m twelve.”
“Then you are old enough. Your friend is not.”
“Eugene’s almost thirteen.”
“He is not old enough in the way that matters, David. Your conversation in class, you and your friend”—Dr. Levi acknowledged the transgression with a quick punishing eye—“gave me the impression that you are aware of the Shoah.”
“I am?”
“The Holocaust. The great crime against our people.”
“The Nazis,” Davey said, beginning to understand.
“Nazis are not something to make a joke of. They are history’s greatest criminals. They are beyond even God’s forgiveness. But then you are innocent…”
“Innocent of talking in class?”
“Innocent of evil, David. Now you will know. Come with me.”
The top half of the door to the library room was glass. Davey had looked in many times at the leather books, some very old, but also at the shelves of books in colorful modern jackets. He had never been inside. As recently as that afternoon, before class, he had looked at the shelves hoping to see the book he was looking for, the book about poison. Now he saw only the foolishness of this errand. Dr. Levi used one of the many keys on a large dangling ring to open the door.
“I want you to study this one, David.” I vant you. In the library Dr. Levi sounded more than ever like Grandma Freyda. The principal dropped a heavy book on the table. “Also this.” The books had tattered paper covers, on one of which was a building like a factory with smoke coming from two square chimneys. Davey knew the book had to do with Nazis and Jews, and he wondered if the relatives he had never met—Grandma Freyda’s sisters and brothers who had died in the war, and for that matter family on both sides whom Mrs. Isaacs spoke of sadly—had been in the ugly place on the cover.
“I will be in my office. Sit. Read. Study the photographs. They are very difficult to look at but you will soon be thirteen. A man. Take as much time as you need.”
And Davey was alone in the library.
*
School was in its final hot days, and Davey still walked the railroad tracks toward the synagogue every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Sometimes he walked with Eugene Stein, sometimes not. Today he did, but he let Eugene walk ahead. He watched the boy wobble, his natural gait. The slow pace suited Davey. He looked at the trails of jets, which marked the sky with a writing as strange as Hebrew used to seem. He thought of the astronauts who had almost reached the moon but had to turn back, because that was their mission. The next crew, God willing (as Grandma Freyda liked to say) would land. He had been reading the newspaper but not so much the sports and comics in the local paper, the way he used to. Now he read his father’s paper, the Boston Globe, or tried to. Usually he read it alongside Mr. Isaacs, each of them taking a section and Davey watching to see where in the newspaper his father looked and for how long.
That morning a small item in the first section had caught his attention. It was a report of a skirmish on the border of Israel and Egypt. A few soldiers were killed. Davey had been nine during the Six-Day War, and had to have the event explained to him, which Dr. Levi did in one of their recent conversations. He and the director of the shul were practically friends, as if what Davey had lost with Eugene had reappeared in a surprising new form. Of course
they weren’t really friends, they couldn’t be; but Dr. Levi made him feel like they were, and already, well ahead of schedule, they had begun preparing for Davey’s Bar Mitzvah. The news from Israel was somehow part of that, a part of his relationship with Dr. Levi and everything else that went on at the synagogue but not so much at home. His father hadn’t even noticed the small article about the border incident, or if he had he turned right past it with his methodical, moistened finger.
Now they passed the old depot, its roof caved in from a storm years before. It was hard to imagine that once, when Mr. Isaacs had been Davey’s age, you could get lunch at the counter. Except that his father couldn’t eat there, not with Grandma Freyda and not alone. The lunch counter, Mr. Isaacs had told him, was restricted. They passed the building yard and the rusted railroad switch where you could climb the fence. Then the tree stump where Eddie Ehrets had sat, but Ehrets wasn’t there. Suddenly lonely, Davey caught up with Eugene and tried to talk baseball. Both of them liked the Mets, who never won anything and were always overshadowed by the Yankees. But his friend, who was still his friend even if he knew less of the world than Davey once believed, was in one of the distant moods that seemed to overtake him lately, and they ended up talking about nothing. By unspoken agreement they no longer played their old game. Davey had learned too much, and Eugene either silently understood this or had simply gotten sick of the game, as they eventually got sick of every game. At shul it wasn’t unusual now for Davey to stay after by himself, supposedly to study for the far-off day when he would become a Bar Mitzvah, even though Eugene was older and thus closer to the event. Always the conversations with Dr. Levi went onto other, often difficult, topics.
*
He was sitting in the dirt smoking, his back to the faded clapboards of Bouchard’s Variety. They would have passed by unaware if he hadn’t spoken. First he showed them the crooked grin. Then he said, “Isaacs the Jew boy.”
It seemed Eugene was no longer worth his notice. This, along with the grin, is what did it. To Davey the grin said something worse than the words: that Eddie Ehrets was the master and they were prisoners, prisoners of the streets of their own town. Davey was of average strength but something inside him was not, and before Ehrets knew what happened—before Davey himself knew—the larger boy was being crushed into the dirt by the smaller.
He held the big arms down with his knees and squeezed hard on the surprisingly thin neck. Here beside Bouchard’s nothing grew, as if the ground itself had been poisoned. For a while Ehrets’s lit cigarette glowed in the dirt, then lay as dead as all the other discarded butts. A small amount of blood pooled near it. The ugly head must have hit broken glass on the way down. At a safe distance Eugene sat watching. Bearing witness.
Bearing witness was very important when it came to the Shoah, Dr. Levi had said. There were people who wanted to erase it from history, people right here in this rich, enlightened country. Davey found this hard to believe at first but easier after more discussion; he found it perfectly believable here next to Bouchard’s Variety, watching Ehrets struggle as he squeezed the skinny neck. Eventually the struggling stopped. Davey had all of a lazy summer afternoon to decide whether Ehrets should be allowed to live or die. Among the lessons at shul were the commandments, and Dr. Levi had gone over them individually in private study. Not killing was number six.
Also covered were matters not in the Bible or the Talmud, horrors unforeseen even by the ancient writers who dwelled on every war, pestilence, plague, and catastrophe they knew or could imagine. But even they could not have imagined the Shoah.
Dr. Levi had been about Davey’s age when his father’s butcher shop in Budapest was destroyed. He was just a little older when the family moved from their house to live with another family in a single room in a slum—a ghetto, he called it—in the distant city of Lodz, Poland.
For a moment Davey relaxed his grip and Ehrets, able to talk, said, “I have to go to the bathroom.”
“So?” Davey said.
“So you want to sit there all day smelling my shit?”
“I smell it already.”
From the other side of the dirt lot Eugene laughed.
“They had to go to the bathroom in the concentration camps, too,” Davey said. “You think the Nazis let them?”
“You’re crazy, Isaacs,” Ehrets said, and Davey squeezed again, harder.
Something Davey had read about with special fascination and horror were the medical experiments. Dr. Levi, who spoke openly, if emotionally, of most aspects of the Holocaust, preferred not to talk about this topic. Out of respect Davey studied it by himself. The synagogue library had many books.
“There were doctors there who did experiments,” Davey said. “One was where they sewed up people’s assholes, then watched what happened.”
“What’s that have to do with me,” gasped Ehrets.
“It makes you lucky,” said Davey. “Lucky you can go at all.”
Eugene Stein laughed hysterically.
In 1942, a year after they had been forced into the ghetto, Dr. Levi and his family were moved to Auschwitz. His sister and mother were killed immediately. His father, who had a bad heart, was spared the gas chamber only because he died on a work crew. Dr. Levi, whose name was Bela, slept with his brother Sandor on a wooden pallet. They slept in each other’s arms to keep from freezing. On New Year’s Day, 1945, fifteen-year-old Bela woke up colder than usual and discovered that his little brother had died during the night. A few weeks later Russian soldiers in tanks broke through the electrified fence, and a year after that Bela Levi arrived in America.
There was nothing more to see or do here. Ehrets lay motionless with his eyes closed, like a corpse. Eugene, a spectator, was useless. To liven things up Davey said, “Let’s play, Stein.”
“Play what?” Eugene said.
“You know what. I’ll go first. Cyanide.”
Eugene looked uncomfortable, squatting in the dirt. Finally he said, “Henbane.”
“Cyanide,” Davey cried. He expected Eugene to tell him repeating was against the rules but he did not. Davey knew he wouldn’t dare say it was in bad taste.
“Sarin,” Eugene said without enthusiasm.
“Cyanide!”
Eugene shifted his position, like a catcher getting ready for a pitch. “Maitotoxin.”
“You’ve been cheating,” said Davey. “Admit it, Stein. You have a book.”
Eugene Stein admitted it.
Suddenly it was fun again, fun to be here with his friend, fun to be free. Davey, done deliberating, concluded that it would be wrong to break a commandment, and let go of the skinny neck. The foul-smelling boy got up and ran away so fast he probably didn’t hear Eugene call after him, “You’re a Nazi, Ehrets!”
For a little while they played the game but it got boring. Eugene suggested a soda at Bouchard’s. Davey said he would rather drink poison. They laughed and suddenly they weren’t bored anymore. And the boys sat in the dirt amidst the broken glass and blood and talked about the long vacation that was about to begin and whether the Mets had a chance this year, 1969.
The Photography of William C. Crawford
Gooseneck Light with Shadow
Salem Saxman
Newbury Street Cleaners
Poems
The Columnist
KATHLEEN APONICK
—on the anniversary of the start of the Iraq War
Nyhan was dead, felled by the snow he lifted, its blow to the heart.
Stars glittered in his honor, he who wrote early of the war,
chiding politicians in his columns with intellect and wit.
We needed him, the case he built against unfounded invasions yet we listened to experts declaring there were weapons, weapons of mass destruction that were never found.
In time, our surviving soldiers returned, leaving a void in that place of warring factions where more would die, thousands.
There seemed no end to the madness and Nyhan was dead.
In memory of David Nyhan (1940-2005), columnist for The Boston Globe and other regional newspapers
Dugout
JAVY AWAN
1.
How great to have a dugout, to see the day and its tasks open away from the top step, like a bright green diamond, a level field trimly maintained and groomed, foul lines chalked, distances measured and marked, your pennants cheerfully breezing, your name arced across your back, above your auspicious, echoing number.
A dugout! This is the bigs, you’ve made the team, you’ve gained an entry in the book of records, a place won in the sun or under bright floods at night. Take the field at your position amid the rush of mates singing the anthem. Each inning, the opponent’s tack to round the block of bases and safely touch home plate halted, you repair to the dugout, to that inset lair to strategize and regroup, under the cool of the roof, to view from ground level, to perch on the stairs, or lean against the rail, or rest on the bench to chat or chirp encouragements or jaw at umps or chew and spit to concentrate on one good end—to go out and win, to persist inning by inning, to score and thwart any countersurge. The dugout supplies a cozy refuge a boost for morale, a connection to the clubhouse, a stage for congratulations, pick-me-ups, bonhomie, judicious coaching, and soon-forgiven tantrums, to duck from unjust boos or tip to cheers the hero’s cap.
Every home should open to a dugout that offers perspective and vision, a sense of belonging, of mission, talent, and training brainy and brawny
2.
Also good is a dugout canoe. Finding the right tree near navigable waters, felling it, bracing and pegging it for the carve-out, and hacking, gouging, and sanding it smooth outside and in, with twin oval indents for seating, with foothold clogs, plus oars and pins and waterproofing, may take weeks, but to launch and glide downstream or paddle up in a sleek trunk of your own carving is marvelous— or to watch the wake spread like whiskers on a placid bay.
Haiku
ALAN S. BRIDGES
spring below the rapids the river disentangles
summer
an old song pours from a Navajo toehold canyon wren
autumn
harvest moon the shine of a dime in the lint basket
winter the black lacquered lid of a propped-open piano winter night
Lowell
NAOMI CHANLINA CHUM
Smiling people lean against the red brick wall,
An empanada here, an eggroll there, a samosa completes the picture.
A baklava and boba tea to sweeten your tooth.
So many errands to run and so many people to visit.
A better community is brewing.
The river swooshes and shares peace.
We gather by our precious water,
The present as important as the past.
We have come a long way.
Always remember that change is possible.
Accept one another’s uniqueness.
Nudge a friend to speak up
For our ancestors, grandparents, family, children.
Lowell stays in my heart.
Song
MARIANNE DONAHUE PERCHLIK
Do you hear it?
The clapping leaves in the breeze Clouds gesture the chickadee calls her mate footsteps, stocking feet on the stair the bell of a pot, washing in the sink
In the silence, now a face of a dear one, a beloved friend the music of our gaze meeting in the air dwelling in love I was afraid to speak and break the moment the song was already there shimmering
Perhaps it's not about the song but the impression coming after like frost crystals on the window in the morning It's not so much about the song what it is-
is the record of the inspiration the moment of conception something occurred a meal was gathered guests arrived and shared a feast ringing silverware, clatter of plates mingling of voices movement of chairs glasses with ice swirling libations the conversation wanting to arise longing there is a song in the listening in the glances the crust of a baguette torn
Elegant and Eternal
DOUG HOLDER
On my Covid night trembling like a drunk on detox my shirt soaked in sweat clung to me like a skin to keep me intact. It was then he came to mea snake oil salesman a man appointed in plaid and polyester with a wide, hateful smile gave me his fever dream, Crazy Eddie sales pitch “Elegant and Eternal, Elegant and Eternal.” What was he selling? a casket, an urn or perhaps a bill of goods straight to the inferno
The Polish Uncle
PAUL ILECHKO
My Polish uncle was famous for his peaches which he watered in a greenhouse in a small town in Yorkshire he lived on the street where I would walk with my brother when I took him to see the trains happily sitting for hours on a brick wall waiting patiently for each locomotive to pass down the street was the football stadium where the local team in black and white kit would hustle and sweat all through the chill of a northern winter all this decades ago my uncle long dead the stand demolished and rebuilt even the winters not as cold as they used to be the river that used to flood each summer is drying up or so I hear it flowed towards the North Sea rising in the Pennine hills the winding spine that separates heart from lungs covered in the gorse and heather of the high moors many of these small northern towns grew up on the banks of rivers built around mills and factories a world of steel and coal where people spoke their own dialect harsh and obscure to outsiders easily assimilated by Slavic immigrants fleeing a war their hardness mirrored in the heavy black soil matching the effortless grace of the rugged goats and the limestone and grit of the mountains releasing their pure clear water into the valleys below.
Outside Boston University’s Agganis Arena with Those Who Couldn’t Get Tickets to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, Ninety-Fourth Birthday Address, January 15th, 2023
TOM LAUGHLIN
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”—Martin Luther King, Jr.*
The sky is hazy now as Dr. King’s speech ends, and we look up finally from simulcasts on our phones and iPad screens, the afternoon sun straining through a mesh of gauze above a rainbow of hats and the line of winter-empty trees frozen in red brick and sidewalk cement on their march west along Commonwealth Ave. Following the crackle of commands echoing from belted radios, the blue peaked caps of Boston have begun to move into position again—white and black and Asian men and women— readying at crosswalks and arena doors, with their Secret Service cousins in black, for the throng of dignitaries, celebrities, clergy, and Dr. King himself, flanked by family.
Some in our outside crowd are being asked a second time to step back from the stanchions and red ropes, and we move slowly in our daze of emotion eyes still struggling into focus, children waking after a shared dream. The January breeze can’t touch us now as we’re still aflame with the glory of Dr. King’s face, deeply lined now, but with eyes sharply focused, and the echo of his passionate call for a just, inclusive, sustainable world where unity trumps dis-unity,
love triumphs over hate, and our children and children’s children will make it past the mountaintop and into the Promised Land.
Tomorrow we’ll turn back renewed with energy, determination, and hope to continue our work in neighborhoods and classrooms, community centers and churches, libraries, ball fields, board rooms, and banks, small businesses and non-profits, community colleges and corporations, sports arenas, town halls, and temples, public buses, police departments, polling places, and prisons, newsrooms and courtrooms and mosques, health care centers, hospitals, and universities, synagogues and social clubs, soup kitchens and state houses, and everywhere “that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.”**
*From his “Loving Your Enemies” sermon, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, November 17, 1957.
**From his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Oslo, Norway, 1964
On Seeing Wang Hui’s Clearing after Rain over Streams and Mountains
MATT W. MILLER
A finer fire than fire the coppered leaves of maples burning with midrib gut of gone summer green
even those in a shivering soak upon my muddy yard after an October afternoon of wind of water of seeing
Wang Hui’s painting of a landscape slip through me a mountainside painted with horsehair brush I think back to the photo that Eric studying to be a farrier sent me of a long trough of sawed-off hooves students use to practice pulling horseshoes and so maybe a brush is out there somewhere belonging to one of those dismembered hooves and if I squinted into Hui’s painting could I find the wisp of tail that swept the rain down the valley and off the trees some trace of where the horseman’s daughter may have brushed its mare four centuries ago like my buddy Johnny’s daughter does at a school in Maryland and she knows horses well and woke before dawn during middle school to work at a farm and tend to their horses it helped
her with anxiety equine therapy it’s called I don’t know horses at all although I rode one down a steepled ridge
with students in Costa Rica I wonder if horsehair brushes are harvested from the dead after boiling down horses for glue or maybe dog food like the factory down the street from my junior high school on hot June days the stink of cooking broke through the seething bricks of the building and someone would say Smell that? and the answer was
always Neigh! even as we pulled shirts up over our noses and sometimes even eyes to block the burnt hair breeze
crawling up Fort Hill and so Hui was one of four Wangs of the late Ming period famous for painting with Hui being
the most famous but critiqued for his nostalgic style but I lied it was really Eric’s photo of hooves that had me
looking up horsehair brushes and they brought me to Wang whose work I didn’t know before this cloud cloaked day
recast the leaves into veins of flame that dragon down a fiber sky like artifice like lies like the way one rearranges the mind
The Distant Mountain Range
LUCY LARCOM
They beckon from the sunset domes afar, Light’s royal priesthood, the eternal hills; Though born of earth, robed of the sky they are; And the anointing radiance heaven distills
On their high brows, the air with glory fills. The portals of the west are opened wide; And lifted up, absolved from earthly ills, All thoughts, a reverent throng, to worship glide. The hills interpret heavenly mysteries, The mysteries of Light,—and open book Of Revelation; see, its leaves unfold
With crimson borderings, and lines of gold!
Above the rapt reader, though soul-deep his look, Dreams of a glory deeper than he sees.
At Collins Pond
HELENA MINTON
Heron on the end of a log, December, staring down.
He has an itch and scratches his belly for more than a minute, long enough that we can really see a simple, private moment in his day, not his overhead, majestic self, the one we have infused with symbolism. It’s rare to see a heron, close-up, or without his wings spread. Satisfied, he lifts one leg way up under him and waits.
Once a deer passed, ghostly, among the trees. We weren’t sure we’d seen it, if that’s what we saw, and we talk about it from time to time, reminding each other, “remember when we thought we saw or almost saw the deer,” and the memory is as faint as the day the pheasants were released from the old truck, and of our finds underfoot: a toad alert in the leaves, a lady slipper shadow, a sandy hornets’ nest of stings, the feather lying in the fire road.
Oona, Moving to Sao Luis
DAVE ROBINSON
—A portrait, using Instagram posts
The wild magpies in the fruit trees are shy like she can be. Azure-winged ones bumping lemons and oranges in the shade.
A third summer has set in. It’s all new to us.
No owls this night, but one shooting star had a freeing effect on the kid. I busied her with stargazing so Mom could go to bed.
Here, I see my daughter can fly— maybe a more rare creature?
She’s a Hummingbird
Hawk Moth slipping through summertime Alentejo.
A smudged spiral is the pattern its wings make across my dim photograph taken outside the café— where she’s met her new friends to race around at sunset. They’ll play hide-and-seek all over town until eleven.
Some beer, wine, dessert for us adults. Dogs roaming, ska music on the sound system . . . She’s suppressing a smile
because my daughter is done—and good at being done—with it all.
She’ll lean on “I don’t know,” and her anarchist’s heart until the goth-like Lusitanos love her.
Spring Training Winter Haven
JIM PROVENCHER
for Rico Petrocelli
A little sore a little stiff winter’s never long enough oil the glove bone the bat polish spikes wet a chaw memory saves a step around the bag I can spoil the jam inside give me the extra base I’ll take it I lie like leather in the groove
Sweat showers like success and works warm lubricant round my thickened waist and raisin skin my eyes are slit like gunsights drawing beads on flies and fouls the mortgage on third’s paid off with dives for darters barehand grabs I’m no evicted shortstop who lost his wheels I make my home at third
I protect the plate punch and stick behind the runner bingle in the hole I can deliver the long ball when it counts 15 last year this year I’m 30 maybe I’ll switch to a lighter bat ball sails in big as a continent this spring and with a sweet smack I kiss the equator they pay me to hit ropes
My past performs like a politician routine buddy the old routine I never wash my socks my feet know what to do somewhere in the diamond constellation I’m a steady star I feel good I know the best place to eat in any town
Another spring not the spring not coming off a big year and nowhere near my last at all no ground ball hiccups off the grass good hands good hands my hands smooth as ash the color of wood routine outs scattered clapping polite as I approach the plate no burden but to do my job the sun is butter on my back that kind of year that kind of year
First Rain
CHATH pier SATH
The miracle of cleansing rain.
Flashing light lashes at me trembling in the shower.
The giant’s roar thunderous and tumultuous.
Downpour takes the ground floor to rivers and streams.
The earth drinks through the grassroots.
Trees are happy. The seeds sprout.
Life thrives in crevices of concrete and between rocks.
Rain greens, cleans, and redeems.
Rain resurrects shine and sheen.
Everything grows.
Morning News
BILL O’CONNELL
My mind questions the rain that fell while we slept and begins again before breakfast. I align myself with the hidden super-moon the Times writes about below a photo of a soldier with one arm.
What does rain know about war? In the photo it falls over the damaged and the dead, on men intent on killing each other or dying, who come from villages beyond the cities to fight.
I scroll down. The rain falls faster, working through the leaves of the tall maple. On the next screen a map of Ukraine dissolves. I know more than what I’m told, more than I want to know.
7/23
Rogers Hall, 1947
TOM SEXTON
for Anne Sexton
One night we climbed its tall fence and ran across the endless lawn of Rogers Hall that we had been told was a boarding school for rich girls who did “it” in the back seat of taxi cabs.
We ran from tree to tree toward the building with the swimming pool where older boys from the neighborhood claimed to have seen girls swimming naked. The watchman caught us soon enough.
Was that you, white-capped and sleek, slicing through the blue-green water, the one who saw us at the window, or were you in your room writing poems your mother claimed you plagiarized?
Our brothers swam in the canals you had to cross to get downtown. One year, a girl caught her foot in a mattress spring on the bottom of the canal where she was diving.
People watched her struggle from the bridge, hands waving from just below the surface until she turned her face away as if embarrassed. Her body seemed as white as chalk when they laid her on the bank.
She was a pieceworker who slipped away from work to swim that afternoon. Did you know? Would it have mattered? Despair like water seeks its own level. You dove too deep, and it was waiting.
The New Doctor
GEORGE PERREAULT
She looks up, the other guy he says here your wife’s spirits are pretty good but her prognosis is poor, says you appreciate life’s inherent tragedy, does that about cover it?
Thinking about basswood, big yellow leaves in the fall, better luck with grafts than seed, couple butternut trees by the gate open to a good-sized hole where the barn used to be.
Once saw a milk snake slipping through its rock foundation, muscling deeper into memory, copperheads in Apalach, rattlesnake clattering the trail in San Patricio, officious lil bastards.
She liked it there, across the creek, porcupine now and then, falcons, bare cottonwood along the wash draped with sleepy vultures, wings spread warm and black in the morning sun.
Turkeys fattened in the orchard, burbling as they followed her through the long grass where apples which had fallen lay unbruised at her feet, and I guess, yeah, that covers it.
Hurt
JE’NIYAH SNEED
2023 Jack Kerouac Poetry Contest Winner, Lowell High School
Crash!
Open my eyes
I’m on the asphalt
But I didn’t die
I’m still alive
Creak
Your doors open
As I check and see
The bruises on my elbows, and my knees
And the bruises you can’t see
Tears
Months later I’m in a cast
Waking up screaming in the night
Trying hard not to fight a fight that shouldn’t need to be fought
And if you had thought
That I couldn’t have felt more lost
Than I did right at this moment you would have been wrong
Why
I’m hiding in a place
That should feel safe
But it isn’t and it doesn’t
So there’re tears rolling down my face
As I am trying so hard to fight the pain
Why
It’s my birthday I know you don’t like me
I know you couldn’t find The kindness that’s inside me
I was already about to cry
So why
Did you have to tell me I should’ve died
When I was hit by a bus I was a bit roughed up But I was fine
So why?
I know I’m a bit weird I know I’m a freak
I know I’m eccentric I know I’m bossy
I know I’m rude and obnoxious and despicable and gauche I know I knowI KNOW I KNOW
WHY?!
I’m hurt
I was 12
And you couldn’t see that my worth was more than the hurt you caused me
But respect that I earned and kindness that I deserved
I’m hurt
I work hard every day
Constantly say that I’m ok
I gaslight myself so I don’t feel afraid
So I don’t feel the pain
So I can’t feel a thing
I’m hurt
And my scars won’t ever fade away Due to the memory that you ingrained Deep inside of my brain So I’ll forever and always feel that I’m insane
I’M HURT
Three Poems
BILL TREMBLAY
Gray-Backed Gulls
A shadow streaks along the seawall, wings scissors in the hands of a dress-maker who cuts the fabric of salt air. Its chevrons rise to a streetlamp standing watch over the parking lot. Strictly speaking there’s no such thing as a seagull. Larus fuscus is its Latin name. Gulls blurred against blue swells are white dots bobbing, a circle of middleaged women gabbing on a half-cloudy day when things feel strangely unconscious, freighters locked on course at the horizon, jets in their final descent, bathers in bikinis, rebuses read the way dreams are. A gull points her hooked beak toward the tin sheet of shallow waves where a little boy with a red pail tries to catch her as she picks up a fist-sized rock, wings it to granite breakwater boulders, drops her cargo, clam cracks open. Another gull swoops in, tries to steal the gleaming meat. She has to fight to eat. No big deal. What does my heart tell me about her? That her dotted eyes question the world as mine do, that I can share her joy in flight and bear the rain as she does.
Body Surfing
This is the day I’ve been waiting for, six-foot breakers galloping in hordes. It doesn’t matter how cold the water. I take what the ocean offers, wade up to my waist and dive through the bottle-green brow of waves that sear my back with frothy tongues. More are coming, humping swells plowed up by killer whales. I’ll only catch them if I time them right, leave my feet at the moment when the arc is razor sharp and swim hard as the crests rise at their own pace massaging my stomach until they crash and I tumble onto the scrub-board of wet sand beneath the sudsy rush of its voice hissing and sparkling, spent in its own completion. I stagger to my feet, knocked back down by the next wave, wipe salt from my eyes, my legs lassoed by seaweed in undertow, the next surge building. I can reach them if I kick hard before they’re gone.
End of a Country Day —after Wang Wei
A church bell sounds along the river over the quiet roar of a small waterfall
a call that spreads between cupped hands of canyon foothills over granite peaks to flat grasslands where a rancher leans from her saddle, locks a stock pen.
Nothing to be sad about. Still, sunset through pink lily clouds clutch
the last light of a country day as if there never ever will be another such.
Dear friends, living and dead, this is where I picture you, happy we are together, sharing a meal as we reflect this waning light.
Two Poems
MA YONGBO
Translated by J.D. Scrimgeour and the Ginling Collective
Note
In the fall of 2019, a year after my first teaching gig in China, I began meeting with a small group of Chinese students and some local writers to translate contemporary Chinese poetry. The students were English majors, part of a 1-2-1 dual degree program with Ginling College in Nanjing, China. They studied at Salem State University for their middle two years of college and received degrees from both institutions. It has been a unique collaboration. The Chinese students brought a youthful enthusiasm for poetry and a sensitivity to Mandarin, while I and the other American writers brought a familiarity with poetry and the nuances of English. In 2021, one of the original students who had returned to China introduced me via email to Ma Yongbo, an accomplished contemporary Chinese poet whose work had rarely been translated. Over the next few years, the translation group, called “The Ginling Collective,” focused on translating poems by Ma, and this past summer, when I returned to China, two students and I had the opportunity to meet with him.
These two poems by Ma Yongbo span nearly the entire length of his career. “The Return” (1986) captures a college-age son’s elemental desire to return home, while “On a Small Street Lined with Aspens” (2019) looks back at a formative moment in a courtship. Despite their differences in style, both poems, while seemingly drawn from personal experience, contain Ma Yongbo’s sense of reality as ungraspable, slipping away from us due to both the passage of time and the limitations of language.
At the end of a small street lined with aspens I kissed you. It was the first time. The two of us so tall, so twenty-three, under a big, blue-white aspen.
What year was that? What spring or autumn when I kissed your mouth so suddenly, an impulse. You had been talking, sun speckling your face through the leaves.
You accepted the kiss as if it was natural, the way things should be. And we forgot what we had been saying.
I should remember that day, but it’s long forgotten. Let’s say it was spring, clusters of thin pods on the aspens still intact, soon to release their white seeds, small missiles for mischievous children to fire from slingshots.
That little street only existed for a moment. I’ll never find it, and I don't know where it leads. It meant nothing to me then. Now it’s full of meaning.
12/21/2019
回归
秋天总听到那个声音 在门外
忽远忽近
天空中飘着马的影子
土里依然很热
土地遭遇了很多
那窝土蜂就悬在太阳近旁
我去看过
草在远处断裂着
盖住了水窖
风吹过来的时候
我从外面回来
那个声音也从外面进来 像一只皱缩的手
接着就下雪了
雪盖住了蜂巢
我知道我该回去了
在很远的门里
我将温暖地坐下
让那声音
摸着面颊
1983秋
The Return
In autumn, I hear that voice outside my room, far, near.
The shadow of a horse floats through the sky. The ground is still hot, the land has suffered.
I come upon a swarm of bumblebees hovering near the sun.
In the distance, grass stalks snap, cover the empty cellar.
The wind blows, and I return to my room, the voice following me in like a wrinkled hand.
The snow comes, covers the hive.
I know I should return to that distant door.
I sit in the warmth, let that voice touch my cheek.
Autumn 1983
Frost in Russia
CORNELIA VEENENDAAL
He must have seen birch woods where village people hunt mushrooms and the medicinal fungus.
On the drive from Leningrad to Komarovo he might have passed birches bent to the ground
as if boys had swung on them. And when he sat talking about Sophocles with a woman in a pale lilac shawl, did Akhmatova read for him And the birch tree limping across the field As if it were serving time,. . .?
When she read for him, her words were the music of a voice from the far side of a wall.
*
He was ill the day of his appointment with Khrushchev, who came to his bedside
and they had their talk, It was just two months before the Cuban missile crisis would be resolved in talk.
The Missionary Factory (an excerpt)
JEANNE SCHINTO
From The Missionary Factory: A Chronicle of the Nineteenth-Century Theologians, Bible Scholars, Preachers, Teachers, Translators, Printers, and Ordinary Townspeople of Andover, Massachusetts, Who Tried to Save the World.
Jeanne Schinto’s book Huddle Fever (1995) is a history of what the city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, once produced: cloth. The Missionary Factory is a history of what Lawrence’s nearest neighbor once produced: men of the cloth, specifically at the Andover Theological Seminary, an entity that trained clergy from 1808 to 1908, on the campus of Phillips Academy, which was founded in 1783. An orthodox, Calvinistic entity likely would have been established somewhere in New England—a counterbalance to the Unitarians of Harvard, who were in the ascendancy and starting to threaten the Congregational status quo. Why it was founded in Andover; how it developed into an international, ecclesiastical powerhouse that initiated the American Protestant mass missionary movement of the nineteenth century; how its graduates and their supporters fit into the broader cultural, economic, and political context of their century, beyond their theological concerns and conflicts; and what precipitated the Seminary’s downfall—that is the story The Missionary Factory tells. The following is an excerpt.
Samuel Phillips Jr. Builds a Gunpowder Mill and Founds an Academy for Boys
New England resembled Scotland . . . the hard soil, the ice, the granite and the Calvinism.
—Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England (1936)
The Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge was founded in Edinburgh in 1709 to establish schools and promote the faith in “uncivilized” parts of the Scottish Highlands and among the indigenous people of America. The Anglican organization hired missionaries in the colonies, including David Brainerd (17181747) after he was expelled from Yale in his third year for sympathizing with the religious revivals being inspired by the preaching of British evangelist George Whitefield (17141770) and for having been overheard remarking that a certain college tutor of his, a Mr. Whittelsey, had “no more grace than this chair.”1In December of 1742, he began working on Long Island, in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and along the Massachusetts-New York border. Still in his twenties, he died of tuberculosis in the Northampton home of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758).
Two years later, Edwards published An Account of the Life of the Late Rev. David Brainerd, 1 Jonathan Edwards, The Life of David Brainerd, Missionary to the Indians (Edinburgh: Johnstone and Hunter, 1853), 19.
purportedly based on Brainerd’s private diary (as opposed to his public journal), but it was heavily annotated and edited, and in the end, mostly the work of Edwards, whose byline it bore. “My spiritual conflicts to-day were unspeakably dreadful,” the account says Brainerd wrote on January 14, 1743, “heavier than the mountains and overflowing floods.”2 In the nineteenth century, the book became recommended reading at the Andover Theological Seminary. From there, it became a major influence on both domestic and foreign missionary movements, and is the most frequently reprinted book by Edwards to this day. Up until that publication, Brainerd was better known than Edwards, who was merely local, preaching his sermons to the men and women sitting before him in the pews of the Congregational church in Stockbridge. But as we know, it was eventually Edwards who became the more significant figure—he, whose revision of Calvinism’s basic teachings is pegged approximately to the beginnings of a wave of revivals later collectively known as the Great Awakening.
Calvinism is the theology that had been carried across the Atlantic by the English Calvinists, known as Puritans, because they wanted to “purify” the Church of England. One of its central tenets was that everyone was born morally corrupt—or “depraved,” as the Calvinists liked to call it. Tied to that was their belief in the doctrine of the “predestination” of one’s soul to either heaven or hell and an individual’s inability to change that eternal sentence through moral behavior or anything else. In Muriel Spark’s 1961 novella, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Miss Brodie’s nemesis, her precocious student, Sandy, reflects on that dastardly concept of foreordaining: “In some ways the most real and rooted people whom Sandy knew were Miss Gaunt and the Kerr sisters who made no evasions about their belief that God had planned for practically everybody before they were born a nasty surprise when they died. Later, when Sandy read John Calvin, she found that although popular conceptions of Calvinism were sometimes mistaken, in this particular there was no mistake, indeed it was but a mild understanding of the case, he having made it God’s pleasure to implant in certain people an erroneous sense of joy and salvation, so that their surprise at the end might be the nastier.”
That’s harsh. As Edwards put it in Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, “the foolish Children of Men do miserably delude themselves in their own Schemes, and in their Confidence in their own Strength and Wisdom; they trust to nothing but a shadow.” That is, they were “born of the corrupt human race; and not as born of God.” But Edwards had a genius for supplying what was needed at that moment in American theological history. In his reworking of the original creed, people could give evidence of their election—they could be born again—in an emotional conversion experience. It was a hopeful, hallelujahinvoking message, but it did create a new kind of stress. If conversion was the sole marker of election and the only guaranteed ticket to paradise, people now had the responsibility of inducing it in themselves and, by way of what would become the nineteenth-century’s mass missionary movement, everyone else in the world.
Evangelicals of today say that awakenings and revivals are God’s work. Secular humanists, by contrast, believe they are the result of upheavals brought about by societal change. Whatever an individual reader believes, the Great Awakening did indeed come to Andover, which was growing apace, and, if anything is certain, it is that growth brings change with it. Philip J. Greven Jr. published his findings about Andover’s growth in Four
2 Ibid., 55.
Generations: Population, Land and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts, six years after he earned his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1964.3 The book, which covers the period from the 1640s through the 1770s, is a thoroughly researched and original work detailing and analyzing the ways in which Andover fathers transferred land holdings to their sons—or didn’t. As he discovered, after farmable land became scarce and the cost of acreage rose sharply, some young men were forced to move elsewhere to begin their independent lives. (“Compared to most farming communities, Andover was relatively crowded by the mid-eighteenth century,” Greven wrote.4) Or they could stay and get involved in a trade.
Three sons of an Andover farmer, John Frye Jr. (1672-1739), did not become farmers— perhaps, Greven noted, because Frye died intestate and his land holdings had to be divided among his five (out of seven) surviving sons. The portions—more than one hundred acres each—seem plentiful enough, but not when one considers the work required to get rocky soil to produce viable crops. Accordingly, one of those sons set himself up as a blacksmith; two became hatters. Other trades plied in Andover, according to Greven’s research, included weaving, carpentry, joinery, shoemaking, tailoring, and tanning. By 1718, too, manufacturing of a sort had begun in Andover. In that year, another member of the Frye family set up a saw mill and a grist mill on the Shawsheen River in what later became known as Frye Village (today’s Shawsheen Village). But it was Samuel Phillips Jr. (1752-1802) who built the first real “manufactory” of significance in the town, the first consequential machine in Andover’s garden, so to speak.
In 1775-1776, while still in his early twenties, the man that the Rev. William Bentley (1759-1819) of Salem, Massachusetts, described in his famous diary as “exceedingly attached to interest so as not to leave a pure reputation near him”—“interest” here meaning “profits”—dammed the river and started a gunpowder factory to supply George Washington’s troops.5 Two years earlier, Phillips had been elected town clerk and treasurer of Andover, following the lead of his father, who had held town positions for the fourteen previous years. Typically town offices were held in New England by its wealthier, more prominent citizens, and would tend to remain in families.6 Andoverites, in choosing the Phillips family to govern them, were behaving true to form.
Why did the making of gunpowder happen here? Besides being politically wellestablished locally, Phillips had made significant connections to the Sons of Liberty. On July 19, 1775, he joined Samuel Adams and John Hancock, among others, as the appointed Andover delegate to the Provincial Congress in Watertown. Through that channel a “resolve” was passed “Encouraging Mr. Samuel Phillips Jr. to manufacture gunpowder” for one year.7 But connections may not have been all that necessary to secure the deal. Washington couldn’t afford to be picky. Procuring gunpowder was a constant problem
3 See Philip J. Greven Jr., Four Generations: Population, Land and Family in Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970).
4 Ibid., 177.
5 William Bentley, The Diary of William Bentley, D.D., Pastor of the East Church, Salem, Massachusetts (Salem, MA: Essex Institute, 1905-1914), February 2, 1802.
6 This isn’t just a phenomenon of the past. Current Andover town moderator, Sheila M. Doherty, was elected in 2007, replacing her father, the late James D. Doherty, who had been town moderator for the previous twenty-nine years.
7 Acts and Resolves of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, XIX, 203-204, quoted in Edward Moseley Harris, Andover in the Revolution: A New England Town in a Period of Crisis, 1763-1790 (Andover, MA: Walsworth Publishing Company, 1976), 66.
throughout the war. To wit: when the patriots ran out of gunpowder on Bunker Hill, the British, on their third try, captured it.
Eliphalet Pearson (1752-1826) became Phillips’s partner in the mill. Childhood chums, the two had been educated together in Byfield at the Governor Dummer School (now the Governor’s Academy), then at Harvard. Shortly after graduation (class of 1773), perhaps aided by his long-time friend, Pearson got a job teaching at a grammar-school in Andover. The schoolhouses of the period were one-room shanties. The teacher heard the children’s readings from the Bible and recitations from other religious texts; and the town minister and his wife would customarily visit. The young Pearson was also studying theology and practice-preaching, hoping to be a minister and have a parish himself one day. And although he was eventually ordained, “he was never settled.”8 Years later, Pearson’s son Henry Bromfield Pearson (1795-1867) wrote that his father had a “weakness of sight” and that is why he failed to realize this ambition.9 But as I note below, his personality was more problematic than any physical defect he may or may not have had, and I surmise that a parish would not have easily taken him on till death did them part—which was then the customary length of a pastor’s tenure.
Acting as the mill’s chemist, Pearson devised the formula that would be used to make the product. Exactly how he got his expertise in chemistry isn’t known. He didn’t study it at Harvard, where chemistry wasn’t part of the curriculum until 1782.10 Maybe he didn’t study it anywhere and that is why, along with Phillips’s lack of manufactory experience, the mill was not a raging success. Washington himself is said to have complained about the product’s poor quality. As a result, two Frenchmen were eventually ordered to Andover to oversee the remaking of the operation and British prisoners of war were subsequently employed to help run it.
Worse than poor quality gunpowder, however, at least for the town, was an accident at the mill that occurred on June 2, 1778. Captain Nathaniel Lovejoy, an eyewitness whose progenitors came to Andover in 1650, wrote of the event in his diary: “… about 3 o’clock the Powder House took fire It was destroy’d together with the Magazine & Three Men Destroy’d in the Explotion.”11 The diary of another Andoverite, Philemon Chandler, says the explosion and loss of life caused “great consternation.”12 It must have been a general moment of reckoning for townspeople. According to Sarah Loring Bailey’s history of Andover, published in 1880, there was “considerable local feeling about the danger of the mill,” and work did not resume there until some months later.13
It’s no excuse, but neither Phillips nor Pearson had their full attention on gunpowder.
8 John Lewis Ewell, The Story of Byfield, a New England Parish (Boston: George E. Littlefield, 1904), 142-145.
9 Phillips Academy Archives (hereafter PAA), Head of School Records, Eliphalet Pearson, Box 2, Folder 10, “Henry Bromfield Pearson, 1795-1867,” undated manuscript copy of a paper written by Pearson’s son, “Respecting Dr. Eliphalet Pearson.”
10 See Joe W. Krauss, “The Development of a Curriculum in the Early American Colleges,” History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 2 (June 1961), 64-76.
11 American Antiquarian Society, Nathaniel Lovejoy, Diaries, 1762-1809, Mss. Octavo Vols. L.
12 Matthew E. Thomas, Historic Powder Houses of New England: Arsenals of American Independence (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2013).
13 Sarah Loring Bailey, Historical Sketches of Andover: Comprising the Present Towns of North Andover and Andover, Massachusetts (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1880), 347. See also Charlotte Helen Abbott, Early Records of the Lovejoy Family of Andover. https://mhl.org/sites/default/files/files/Abbott/ Lovejoy%20Family.pdf.
On April 30, 1778, a little over a month before the explosion occurred, classes had begun at Phillips’s new enterprise, the “Phillips School,” as today’s Phillips Academy was initially called. Funded by his father and uncle, he had bought land for it piecemeal from Andover farmers at one of the highest elevations in town. Pearson was its first headmaster. Of the school’s first class of fifty-one students, thirteen came from Andover, the rest from the surrounding region. The students’ ages ranged from six (Josiah Quincy III of Boston) to twenty-nine (James Anderson of Londonderry, New Hampshire).14 That youngest student was the son of Josiah Quincy Jr. and Abigail Phillips, a member of the extended Phillips family. The child was sent away to school because his father had recently died and he and his mother were living with his maternal grandfather, William Phillips, “a man of tyrannical & unamiable character, and it was desirable to remove an active & noisy boy from his household.”15 Alas, in being sent to Andover, he was delivered from one tyranny into another. “I was compelled to sit with four other boys on a hard bench four hours in the morning, & four in the afternoon & study lessons I could not understand,” he wrote.16 Their teacher: Pearson. Numerous secondary sources quote Washington as saying of him: “His eye shows him worthy not only to lead boys, but to command men.” But it’s merely hearsay: as it turns out, someone said that some students said that Washington was said to have said this. It’s better to stick with what others are known to have actually written or said about him—for example, those students of his who not so affectionately called him “The Elephant.”
Besides his first name, the inspiration for his moniker was his ponderous size and gait. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a student in a class that followed Quincy’s, recalled his “large features,” “conversational basso profundo,” and the way “the house shook from cellar to garret at his footfall.”17 But that alone would not have made his bad reputation as a teacher. He was a “distant & haughty” figure, as described by Quincy. “I have no recollection of his ever having shown any consideration for my childhood,” he wrote. “Fear was the only impression I received from his treatment of myself, or others.”18 Pearson, for his part, told Quincy’s mother that her son didn’t have the intellectual capacity for Harvard, his aspiration, and advised her to take him out of the Phillips School forthwith and place him in a counting house. However, Quincy did in fact enter Harvard, at age thirteen, and graduated with highest honors in 1790. Then, on June 2, 1829, he was installed as Harvard’s fifteenth president
14 Biographical Catalogue of the Trustees, Teachers and Students of Phillips Academy, Andover, 17781830 (Andover, MA: The Andover Press, 1903), 25-26.
15 PAA, Head of School Records, Eliphalet Pearson Papers (hereafter EPP), Box 2, Folder 15, labeled, “Bibliographical Sketch of E. Pearson by a Critic.” Although the sketch is an unsigned, typewritten manuscript, it’s almost certainly by Quincy. What is more, similar words and sentiments can be found in Edmund Quincy’s Life of Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867), 26.
16 PAA, EPP, ibid.; Quincy, 25.
17 Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Poet at the Breakfast Table (Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1872), 15-16.
18 PAA, EPP, ibid.; Quincy, 24.
“I Hear You Lima Charlie— How Me?”: A Lost Radio Transmission From the Jungle War
WILLIAM C. CRAWFORD
The electric crescendo overhead went strangely silent as the thunder and lightning gave way to the drumbeat of rain on the rusty tin roof. The Hawk feverishly spun the dials on his old field radio trying to escape the crackling static. This storm was seriously interrupting his obsessive nightly ritual.
“Break!—Break!—Break! Any aircraft this net! I have air warning data. Out of Lima Zulu West on direction 240 degrees, max ord 3600, impacting grid 926324. How’s your copy?”
The Hawk was a forward artillery observer. The whole fucking NVA Second Division had secretly bunkered into the Que Son and Hiep Duc Valleys south of Danang. In August 1969. It was an unholy 120 degrees and the stench of death was everywhere. US infantry units were getting chewed up by disciplined communist forces which had gone undetected for months. The ferocious combat and relentless heat combined to produce hell.
The Hawk was desperately trying to save Bravo Company from being overrun. The dinks had them caught in a blistering crossfire near the Old French Hooch. Air strikes were on the way, but he had to drop some arty in there ASAP to buy time until the jet jockeys could arrive. Bravo already had 6 KIA’s and 9 more badly wounded. What he did in the next three minutes would decide how many grunts would be left alive after the F-4’s dropped their shit.
He was feverishly puffing on a Winston as sweat boiled under his jungle fatigues. AK-47 rounds buzzed around the makeshift Company CP. 82 mm mortar rounds were chopping up the earth as the NVA walked their fire into the perimeter. An RPG crashed into the already badly-pocked wall of the Old French Hooch. Bravo was about to be overwhelmed by well-trained NVA regulars who were now chattering just inside their sagging company perimeter.
The Hawk’s voice was shaky as he called in the co-ordinates, “Red Leg 3-0, this is Red Leg 1-0. I have an urgent fire mission. Unit in heavy contact about to be overrun,” he bellowed into the handset. “Grid 926324. Fire for effect. “
That done, he tried to think of things he might have overlooked. Moments later four white phosphorus artillery rounds pounded into the valley floor near the Old French Hooch.
Problem was, without a defined perimeter for Bravo Company, the rounds found an unintended mark—the chaotic Bravo Company CP. Molten chemicals spewed over the
Hawk and the other GI’s. Several grunts even ran screaming in agony toward the advancing enemy as their sweat-soaked fatigues melted along with their flesh. The Hawk was knocked senseless by the blast, but he was spared a deadly chemical bath by the shelter of a large pile of old bricks left from the dilapidated Hooch. Cries of flaming human anguish blended in with the cacophonic sounds of the fire fight.
*
The Hawk never recovered from that ghastly incident which defined his tour in the Nam. He was exonerated for the misfire by his Company Commander and the Battalion CO. Battery C shot white phosphorus rounds reflexively because they were already locked and loaded. He later attended the Super Bowl compliments of his surviving buddy, former Notre Dame running back, Rocky Bleier, who was burned over 60 percent of his body at the Old French Hooch. He would fully recover and join the Pittsburgh Steelers as they won four Super Bowl rings. He made a name for himself blocking for future Hall of Famer, Franco Harris.
Back in the world the Hawk—a previously free spirit from California—became a heavy smoker, drinker, and drugger. He drifted from job to job, never quite fully taking hold, before eventually settling in the ancient Uwharrie Mountains of central North Carolina. There he lived in solitude on an isolated 22-acre farm, surrounded by the National Forest. A three-mile, pot-holed, dirt road kept visitors to a minimum. The Hawk thrived on isolation. He lived on VA payments. He was sixty percent disabled due to earlier exposure to Agent Orange and his near death at the French Hooch. Heart and lung problems sapped much of his strength, but nightmares from the errant Willie Pete rounds consumed him. He eventually journeyed east to enroll in the gunsmithing program at a community college. As much as the Hawk was haunted by the Jungle War, he was surprisingly fascinated by its artifacts. He hoarded combat memorabilia—helmets, dud grenades, jungle boots, c-rations—anything the grunts used in the jungle. His old farmhouse was clogged with stacks of US Army surplus equipment. Sprinkled amid this clutter were scores of empty beer cans and ashtrays overflowing with piles of rancid cigarette butts. In an odd way, this chaos provided a psychological crutch for the emotionally shaky Hawk, who was always just a thin thread away from unraveling.
During the burning summer of 2014 he was ferreting out surplus gear in one of his favorite local haunts—the Uwharrie General Store. Nestled hard by NC 109 in the National Forest, the store was crammed with hunting and fishing gear, groceries, and beer. The proprietor was retired First Sergeant, Hoss Guiterrez, who relocated his family from Texas so he too could enroll in the gunsmithing program. Hoss sold refurbished firearms in a back corner of the store, and he was the Hawk’s only real friend. Guiterrez was plump and jovial. He’d served in the same battalion in the Nam but at a different time. When things got especially rough with the Hawk, Guiterrez periodically performed impromptu suicide interventions.
Hoss was a procurement genius. He plied the internet locating and buying old combat gear, most of which he sold to his friend for a song. That helped to keep the Hawk fixated on something other than the grim events of 1969. This summer Hoss performed a coup de grace. He located an old PRC-25 field radio. It even had two barely functioning batteries which still held a modest charge.
The Hawk was elated! Clearing out piles of musty jungle fatigues, he placed the relic
radio smack in the center of his living room. He used an old pickup truck battery with frayed red wires to recharge the radio cells. It was a jack-legged setup. Sometimes sparks flew and acrid smoke hung in the humid air. Damned if that sketchy old radio didn’t work after all!
He spent countless hours clutching the battered handset, and he was mesmerized and maybe a bit haunted by the hissing sound produced by the empty radio freq. One late drunken night, amid much static, some military chatter crackled out of the speaker. The Hawk instantly surmised that the transmission was coming from Ft. Bragg troops on maneuvers in the National Forest. They came every summer, and he had just seen GI’s in desert fatigues in the General Store loading up on beer and cigs.
The Hawk became an enthralled if silent participant in their radio transmissions. He hung on every word as he spent hours keeping the PRC-25 charged. This August produced searing heat, often reaching 100 degrees. The ancient Uwharries were not totally unlike the Central Highlands surrounding the Que Son and Hiep Duc Valleys. No lush rice paddies in the vals, but steep enough to be a bitch for GI’s to hump up carrying a full rucksack.
The intense summer heat was suddenly punctuated by daily afternoon thunderstorms with intense electrical ferocity. At the Hawk’s isolated farmhouse, his favorite nocturnal pastime of fondling and listening to the froty-five-year-old PRC-25 was disrupted by explosive lightning bolts which in turn produced unbearable static. The Hawk tried to compensate for these interruptions by chain smoking more Winstons, drinking extra beer, and puffing a fat joint here and there for diversion. He rolled his own with Uwharrie Gold, the local cash crop. The federal land surrounding his old farmhouse was sprinkled with marijuana patches carefully tended by gun-toting local entrepreneurs riding ATV’s. Forest Rangers burned some of the tall green stashes, but there were too many to eradicate completely. The local grapevine also hinted that there were protective payoffs to the underpaid Feds.
As August wound down the Hawk spiraled into one of his periodic depressions. The anniversary of his Bravo Company disaster loomed, and it took a sinister grip on his psyche. One night a near tornado ripped through the Uwharries. Torrential rains and soaring winds threatened to rip the rusty tin roof off the old farmhouse.
The Hawk sprawled on his living room couch drunkenly clutching his cherished handset. The empty push crackled with static from the electrical barrage overhead. The Hawk should have been terrified, but he was totally numb with eternal, overpowering guilt.
A lightning bolt found his chimney. Loose bricks and mortar clattered down on the tin roof. Suddenly there was a lull in the tempest not unlike the coming of a hurricane’s eye. Then the Hawk heard the unimaginable! The raggedy speaker of his PRC-25 crackled to faint but unmistakable life.
“Red Leg 1-0, this is Parker Pen 1-0, over.” Hawk’s long dormant call sign once again echoed out over a military freq.
“Red Leg 1-0, this is Parker Pen 1-0, unit in contact! Gooks in our perimeter. Emergency fire mission!”
The Hawk went rigid. His bloodshot blue eyes popped wide. The old handset snapped up to his mouth as he barked, “Parker Pen 1-0, this is Red Leg 1-0. I have you Lima Charlie, how me, over?”
The bedraggled jungle vet trembled with fear as the pace of the radio chatter rose to a
frantic tempo. “Red Leg 1-0, request an urgent fire mission, saturation on grid 926324. No markers! Fire for effect now. Enemy so close I can hear them whispering to each other and their safeties are clicking off right in my ear!”
Nearly fifty years of torment ebbed in the Hawk’s mind. He sat up tall on his patchwork sofa and tuned back into the Jungle War. Decades of PTSD and guilt gave way to a soldier’s duty and training.
“Red Leg 3-0, this is Red Leg 1-0. I have a fire mission. Unit over run at grid 926324. Fire for effect! In another minute they’ll be wiped out!” The Hawk was operating on pure adrenaline as he relayed a repeat fire mission to LZ West and the 155-mm howitzers of Battery C. The big guns boomed. Their incoming rounds sounded like a fast-arriving train.
It seemed like an eternity before Hawk heard Capt. Gayler’s sharp Texas twang spit out from his old speaker. “Red-Leg 1-0, Parker Pen 1-0. Your shit came in on the dime! Enemy pulling back. You got some GI’s out here that want to hug your neck when we get back up on the hill. Tell the boys at Red Leg 3-0, good shooting!”
Dawn seeped into the Uwharries like a foggy stream. The day promised more summer heat. The Hawk struggled out his front door into the weed-choked yard. The PRC-25 now stood stone cold silent in his living room, the battery long since exhausted. George Hawkins was completely spent, but for the first time in forty-five years he felt no responsibility for anything. His long-neglected body and mind felt strangely cleansed. Had it been a drunken dream? Or had a long-lost radio transmission from the Nam finally arrived, bringing redemption?
* Late September found the Hawk pedaling west up the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge. He was riding a shiny Schwinn Paramount outfitted with bulging pannier bags. He was bicycling home to California where he would join an old buddy to open an arcade on the funky Santa Cruz Pier. On weekends they planned to enjoy a 1950 Packard Super 88 Victoria. His buddy got it for a cool 38 grand on eBay. Strangers along his homeward route often asked about the medal with a multicolored ribbon carefully pinned to his pannier. It was the Bronze Star, an honor secured for him by a grateful infantry captain, William Gayler, from Mineral Wells, Texas. They would speak often by telephone over the years ahead.
The Hawk was finally free. He often lay awake in his sleeping bag gazing up at the comforting stars. Sometimes sleep would finally creep in like a blackened enemy sapper. Then he would suddenly snap awake to the sound of his own strained but calm voice: “This is Red Leg 1-0, I hear you Lima Charlie. How me?” Tears would be streaming down his weathered cheeks.
The Paper Chase
TIM TRASK
From West of Walden
Nearly thirty years ago, a teaching colleague of mine was leading a course called “Introduction to Fiction” at the Bay State Correctional Institution in Norfolk, MA. He asked if it would be okay to include a short story of mine in the class and asked if I’d attend the class when they discussed it so that they could ask questions about how and why I’d written the story. I told him I’d like to do that and thanked him for thinking of it.
The class, a small one, went very well. The inmates seemed to like my story, and I got a glimpse of a group of people doing time wisely, earning college credit.
The next semester, this same friend was teaching the same course at MCI Norfolk and asked me to once again be a guest in his class. It had been twenty-three years since I’d toured that prison. On the appointed evening, we drove together to Norfolk and entered. I signed in as all visitors have always had to do in prisons, and we were directed to the trap, where we had to remove our jackets and shoes and empty our pockets before being checked with a metal detector. Our books, papers, and shoes were checked, also. We then surrendered our driver’s licenses, were given visitor IDs, and were escorted to the classroom.
We had a few minutes to spare before the students arrived, and my friend continued to fill me in on the class as we waited. The students, about eighteen in number, ranged in age from early twenties to late forties. There were black students and white students, and neither group seemed to have much to do with the other. There was tension in the classroom, but it was mild.
My story was scheduled for the second half of the class. We discussed another story in the first half, a story by Tim O’Brien from The Things They Carried. There were two Vietnam veterans in the class. One of them had seen combat. The other, as I recall, had been in the Navy and had spent most of his time just offshore, making occasional visits to Saigon and other ports.
The class was lively. Not everyone participated, but most did. All of them had read the stories under discussion. My story, “Wake of a Whale,” is about a storm that overtakes a father and son fishing on a lake in Maine just after the son has returned from Viet Nam and is trying to figure out what he’s going to do with his life. The father’s response to the storm leads to an epiphany for the son in which he acknowledges the completeness of his life and accepts his own death.
A few of the students in the class didn’t like the story very much, but most of them did. The most interesting discussion followed a statement by one who said that the problems the son in the story faced were just like those that he would face on getting out of prison. They all could relate to that predicament. The son in this vaguely autobiographical story has had failures. These failures and his war experiences have become baggage he’ll always
have with him. He sees the world through a lens clouded by death, misery, and despair. It’s when he sees his father enjoying the spectacle of the storm that threatens to kill him that the son relaxes and accepts the storm as part of the terrible majesty of life and nature.
One of the oldest students in the class, who revealed himself to be a grandfather, who seemed as full of life as any human being I’ve ever met, had eyes that startled me into wonder. They were ice blue and striking on their own, but it was what they revealed about his person that was startling. He had a look of childish enchantment and delight that was unforgettable. I’d seen those eyes before, and I was pretty sure I knew whose they were, though I didn’t want to say; I didn’t think it could be possible.
Before going to the class, my friend and I had discussed whether or not we should tell this class that years ago I’d worked for the department as a Correction Officer. He thought it might distract attention from the story, and neither of us knew how, to be honest, it would affect the discussion, so we decided not to. I wish we hadn’t made that decision.
After class, I asked what he knew about that particular student.
“Oh, Rocky,” he said with a smile. “He’s been there forever. He was a bank robber or something and knew some real celebrities in Vegas and other places.”
I wasn’t sure of the name, but I was pretty sure I’d first seen him and his eyes just before leaving Concord. I knew him as Apollo’s friend. I’d seen him only a couple of times, so I’m sure he wouldn’t have remembered me. It was my last summer there, and I didn’t often work in the East Wing during that time, but I’d been assigned there a few times, and that’s where I’d encountered Rocky, who probably had arrived at Concord during the fall of 1972 or the spring of 1973, while I’d been on leave to finish college. Even then, he’d been a source of wonder to me. Although the other guards called him Apollo’s kid, since he was so much younger than Apollo and was always with him, it seemed clear to me that this was no ordinary “kid.” He, like Apollo, was a highly skilled safe man. Despite his youth, he was even then treated by other inmates as a biggie. Within the prison, he had status, he had confidence, and he did his time as if he were in a nightclub with all his friends. At least that was the feeling I got from him. I don’t remember ever having talked to him, but there are some people who carry high levels of the life force with grace. He was one of them, and you don’t put such people easily out of your mind.
Now it was twenty-one years later, and he was at long last nearing release. I can’t believe but that he’d been out at least once during the intervening period. If he hadn’t, it would have been highly unusual. Everything about him had changed except for his eyes and expression. It was the kind of look that you don’t expect to find on the face of an inmate doing time in a prison.
Seeing Rocky made me believe that even though Thoreau spent only one night in jail, he had it right in this: the state cannot imprison the spirit. It can’t, in other words, without your own complicity. Your attitude has everything to do with your contentedness, wherever you are. Once you know that, a prison is just another place, and when you come right down to it, as a creation of our society made up of its own parts, a prison in Massachusetts is not really different from anywhere else in Massachusetts except in a few important details and, as you can see from what I’ve written, in the intensity of the presentation. That is not to say, however, that this intensification is not significant. A prison is not a good place to live. It does, however, offer a particularly good glimpse into the ways in which we Americans manage to control our own excesses of spirit.
When Tocqueville came to study our democracy in the 1830s, he had already glimpsed the radical nature of a society that without external force (a king) nevertheless did not devolve into chaos. He was coming from a culture which, fueled more directly than ours was by the enlightenment thinkers, had, despite successive empires of force, descended into bloodshed and anarchy on more than one occasion. The enlightenment had culminated in the execution of some of its prominent leaders. Yet here, in America, without being led by an aristocracy, was a people who without an omnipresent military or police force were functioning in relative harmony. His two-volume study of this phenomenon is still one of the best descriptions of how our society works.
But that was thinking I did much later. Driving home that evening I found myself wishing I had spoken to Rocky, but I had a sense that he would be fine on the outside.
Not Quite Ready: A Story of Youthful Dreaming
JERRY BISANTZ
Imust start with this confession: I was born and raised in Buffalo, NY. You know Buffalo, right? Butt of a million and a half jokes. Here’s my favorite about my favorite football team, the Bills. Do you know what B I L L S stands for? No? OK, it stands for “Boy I Love Losing Super Bowls.” FOUR IN A ROW! We know real pain in that city, believe me.
I got hooked on acting in high school . . . mostly musicals. Boy, did I ever love singing and acting on stage. It was the closest to orgasm I ever felt. With my poor luck with the women at that time, it certainly felt like it. I did a bunch of shows in Buffalo, community theater. Then, I took an optical job (I am a licensed optician, I went to school for that) and moved to the beautiful city of Rochester, NY. Rochester must be one of the dullest towns on God’s Green Earth. Bowling, golf, watering lawns and kneeling at the altar of Eastman Kodak. Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. Did some theater there, again, mostly musicals . . . then I played George in “Our Town,” for me, a big break. I LOVED the stage! The camaraderie, the work, the cast parties! But Rochester?? Seriously? This was 1975, baby! I was hungry for a bigger pond.
I had a buddy doing theater in Boston and I took a week off, spent that time walking the city. I fell in love with it, “Dirty Old Boston.” So exciting in those days when punk and disco was just starting to emerge. When you could spend an entire day seeing street musicians, wandering through the North End, even buying a reasonably priced ticket to a Sox game. I went back to work in Rochester and immediately gave my two weeks’ notice. I left that hick town faster than you could sing the closing lines of Thunder Road “It’s a town for losers, I’m pulling out of here a winner.” Beantown, look out, here I come!
I actually moved there on a train, can ya believe it? What did I know? Had $500 saved up and was staying at my buddy’s apartment. That lasted exactly one week when he informed me that he and his girlfriend were moving to Florida. So, he left, and I stayed.
Alone. Gulp.
Now, the world was a little bit more forgiving in those days. Boston in 1976 was not yet the city of high-tech yuppies and 1.5-million-dollar condos. I found a weekly rental in Back Bay ($45 bucks a week, I kid you not!) one room, a bed, and a hot plate. Shared the bathroom down the hall with a hooker with terrible teeth and a drug dealer and his girlfriend from Seattle. I took the subway to South Station every day to work at Manpower in the mornings. Got paid $50 a day cash for 8 hours of work on any manual labor job that they could give me. I had to show up at 5:30 AM to line up for work . . . all sorts of jobs . . . my all-time favorite? Stuffing asbestos into plastic bags. In a room with no ventilation.
But every other day, I went looking for a job. Dropping off my optical resume I mean, I had a New York State optical license, the toughest license to attain. Six days of testing . . . certainly, that would impress these Massachusetts’ folks. I was prime, baby . . . but the economy sucked. Jimmy Carter days. They actually had a “Misery Index” listed every day in the newspaper. And every week I scanned the Real Paper and Phoenix, weekly newspapers, looking for auditions.
One night I ran into a very lovely girl and her boyfriend at a local bar called “Fathers TOO.” She said she was an actress and told me about this teacher that was changing the way she looked at theater, a real Svengali, a man who had created an awareness that she never felt before. I should check him out. His name was David . . . something or other. I scribbled this man’s info on a card and slipped it in my wallet. Wow! A Real acting teacher! I never took classes before, I was all this raw, silly bundle of talent. Oh, I could sing alright, that was my safe spot, but REAL acting! The classics!!! Russian playwrights, Eugene O’Neil, and Shakespeare, and maybe, just maybe, the dude even understood Waiting for Godot.
I WILL DO THIS!! I WILL CALL HIM! I WILL BECOME . . . A REAL ACTOR!!!
So, that night I went to a pay phone . . . (I know, an actual payphone . . .) and called up David . . . “Hello, is this David?” Long pause. “Who is this?” “Uh, my name is Jerry.”
Another long pause. “Jerry with a J or Jerry with a G?” “Uh . . . a J . . .” “Yes, Jerry with a J,” he said, “please enunciate.” This is how my conversation started with him. I told him I had met Melanie and I asked if he had openings in his class. He had a slight accent . . . couldn’t quite make it out. British? Irish? “Theater-ish”? Not quite sure. “What have you done, Jerry?” I told him the roles I had played. Brief resume . . . all lead roles, mind you. He paused. LOOOONG pause. Then, after taking a deep breath he said “a musical actor, eh? My fee is $150, we have a lot of work to do before you can ever call yourself an actor. First class begins next Wednesday at my studio on Huntington Avenue. Be there at 7:00 sharp. I do NOT allow anyone who is tardy to attend.” CLICK Wow! $150 bucks? I was down to $325 in my little bank account . . . was living on hot dogs at the Father’s Too bar down the street. Oh, and muffins. Lots of muffins. Who cares? I am in! On the day of my first class, I didn’t even work Manpower, I had to clear my head, had to be ready. Walked to the docks near Faneuil Hall . . . picked up a copy of An Actor Prepares . . . sat and read what Mr. Stanislavski had to say. Nervous but excited. I am gonna show this dude what I got! Can’t wait to do scenes, test myself against some of Boston’s best!
That night I took the train to the studio, near Symphony Hall. Walked up a narrow flight of stairs to his studio, rapped on the door ten minutes early, mind you. Someone opened the door, and I was immediately hit by the heat of the room and the smell of sweat. It smelled like a locker room after an intense basketball game. Melanie was there, conversing in the corner with a man with a slight ponytail, wearing all black and high-top sneakers. She pointed at me, and the man walked across the room and said “Ah, Jerry with a “J”, so you showed up.” Please go over to that corner and warm up.” Warm up?
O . . . K . . . I didn’t know what to say. About twenty other people were already in the class, the room looked like a dance studio. So, I walked to the corner and “warmed” up . . . I watched what the others were doing and copied them. What the hell?
He clapped his hands, and said “class, please welcome Jerry, he is a musical theater
person.” I heard an audible groan. “But we will fix that, won’t we?” Applause. “OK, time for warmups!”
So, for a half hour we did an assortment of stretches “feel the nape of your neck, be aware of your space . . .” Then he told us about a production of Three Sisters he had been in and THEN he paired two actors across from each other and had them play a game where they spoke nonsense words back and forth for five solid minutes. Then we did an exercise where we all had to fall backwards and get caught before we hit the floor. This was meant to make us aware of our fellow actor . . . the entire class was a bunch of acting exercises and games. Then David said that he wanted us to channel all that inner anger we had towards our parents and let it out in a primal scream. The whole class started holding the sides of their faces and screaming. Hmmm . . . a little problem here: I really like my parents. Does that mean I can’t be an actor? I was wondering if maybe I was over my head here. I just wanted to act, fer cryin out loud! But a look at David’s credits assured me that I must be in very good hands. I just couldn’t wait to get to doing some scene work. Give me a shot at some Tennessee Williams, some Mamet, see what I am made of.
After class, he put his arm around me and told me that I needed a lot of work. He rubbed my neck, told me that I was tense, and he gave me a small book that had a series of yoga poses and exercises that he told me I must do before the next class. I asked him when we would do scene work and he assured me that we would but that I was nowhere ready for that yet.
In the meantime, I continued to study the Real Paper and the Phoenix for auditions, and I finally landed a lead role in a play called Fishing to be done at the BCA, in the days when the South End was a sewer, (we actually had live rats in the dressing rooms in those days, running right over my shoes backstage, but I digress). The play was by Michael Weller, author of a popular play called Moonchildren. Much to my delight, Melanie was cast opposite me, and a guy named Duane from my class, too! Wow! Psyched! Couldn’t wait to tell our teacher that I was cast in a play in downtown Boston with two of his students.
The next Wednesday, before class, I informed him of my great news. He was silent. He stared at me for quite a while. He stated simply: “I don’t think you are quite ready yet, but as long as you don’t miss any of my classes that will be fine.” Since three of the actors in the play were taking his classes our director arranged to have Wednesdays off from rehearsals. That SAME week I got an actual paying job in the optical field at a hoity-toity optical firm in downtown Boston. Whew!!! ON a roll, baby! I was down to $76 in my bank account and in risk of diabetes and diarrhea from my diet . . . I was saved.
The next four weeks were a blur of rehearsals and classes and work at my new job. I literally crashed into my mattress every night. I had started to develop a little crush on Melanie, and we had a love scene where the kiss lasted just a bit longer every night. Basically, I was in heaven.
The show opened to “not so rave” reviews. In fact, we were killed by the Phoenix and the Herald newspapers. The Globe didn’t even bother showing up. Our audiences got smaller and smaller with every performance. But I was proud of our work, and I thought that Melanie and I were very believable in our roles, and our director assured us that was the case. “Don’t pay attention to the so-so reviews,” he said. But . . . where was David? Where was our teacher? He didn’t come opening weekend, or the second weekend. With one weekend to go, I asked Melanie if he would come. I was hoping he would want to see his
students onstage. Melanie appeared a bit hurt but pushed it aside saying, “he is a very busy man”. But I could see in her eyes that she was disappointed.
Thursday night, closing weekend . . . an audience of 16 people in a small black box theater that seated 50. I peek through the curtains before the show. YES! He is here! With an entourage of six people! They are all seated across the back row of chairs. Wow. I tell Melanie and Duane that he is here. I am psyched! Gonna show him what I got! Melanie visibly tenses up. Duane just gets quiet and walks into a corner, takes his script out and begins to study it. I figured, if he doesn’t know his lines by now, we are all in trouble, but I realize he is as nervous as Melanie.
Curtain Speech, opening music, blackout, we hit the stage. Small house tonight, but I don’t care. They broke their ass to get there, find parking, all that stuff . . . they deserve my one hundred percent effort. I feel good, the lines flowing freely, my muscle memory kicking in, staying involved in every moment, Melanie even seems to loosen up and our love scene is tender and feels very real. Suddenly we hear a creaking noise. A lot of movement from the back of the house. I am in mid-sentence as I see, from the corner of my eye, David stands up with his entire entourage and WALKS OUT OF THE THEATER.
I am stymied. Why would he do that? Was something wrong? I momentarily blank. I look in Melanie’s eyes. A light seemed to dim immediately. She lost focus. Blew a line. I picked up for her and we got back on track. Then, I forget my next line. It may have been only twenty seconds or so, but I stumbled about the stage, making up words, trying desperately to stay in character. To find my way back. My brain was desperately trying to focus on the play, to stay “in the moment;” but all the time the other side of my brain is thinking “why did he walk out on us?” I somehow stumble through the rest of the play, even as I see tears forming in Melanie’s eyes onstage. I don’t know how we got through it, but we manage to finish the performance.
After our curtain call in front of nine people, I run backstage and hug Melanie. She is a mess. I am confused. Did something happen? Were we that bad? Was the show so terrible that he couldn’t watch anymore? Was there some kind of an emergency and He had to leave? I went back to my one room dump after drinking one too many beers at the local bar. My head was spinning. I kept trying to think of reasons that our teacher would walk out on us. I mean, I know the show wasn’t great, but it had its moments, and was I a fool for feeling proud of my performance? Am I kidding myself?
Wednesday. I will talk to him on Wednesday. Maybe he can tell me why he left. Maybe he can give me some tips. Or, worse yet, maybe he is right. Maybe I am not ready yet. A musical theater guy trying REAL drama? In a real big city like Boston? Who the hell did I think I was? Who was I kidding?
Wednesday seemed to take forever to come. We had a full class that night. When I walked in the studio, I saw Melanie talking in a corner with David. He had his arm around her, in a very deep conversation. Maybe he will take me aside later? Give me some suggestions? The class started. We did our usual warmups. Then, David ushered us to the middle of the room. The room was quiet. He looked us up and down before he spoke. “I was going to start scene work tonight,” he said, “but, after last weekend, I feel that some of us are not . . . quite . . . ready yet. So, back to our theater exercises.” I felt my face redden. I knew he was talking about us. About me.
For some strange reason, I suddenly found myself standing up. I felt like I had seashells
over my ears. Nausea hit me momentarily. I felt unsteady. But I couldn’t help myself. The room was quiet. I turned to David. “Why did you walk out on us?” It just came out of me; I couldn’t stop myself. The question just hung in the air. The students all looked at me, then looked at David. He was taken aback, but quickly recovered. I saw a slight smile, and then, he nodded to Melanie. Melanie stood up. “It was a horrible production, Jerry, and we just were just not good enough to warrant his time. He saw enough to know.” Duane stood up “He did us a favor. You should know how bad it was.”
Ouch.
All eyes went to me. What can I say? Was I kidding myself? Was it REALLY THAT bad? Was I really that bad? Did David do us a favor? My head was spinning. Maybe they were right. I mean, the teacher has New York credits, a degree from Yale Drama School . . . studied in London. Who the hell am I? Some cheap song and dance man. Harold Hill in The Music Man in High School? Captain Big Jim Warrenton in Little Mary Sunshine? The class stared at me. The silence was palpable. David folded his arms. He just looked at me. Maybe I should just sit back down. My head was spinning. I thought to myself, “I can learn a lot from this guy. He has so much to teach me.” And you know, I did learn. I learned so much from David.
A most valuable lesson.
I walked out that door.
And I never looked back as I ventured into my thirty-five years of working in theater.
Luna Visions
DAVE DEINNOCENTIS
Dirty Don does not like the astronauts. He likes red licorice and twenty-two cent Der Wienerschnitzel hot dogs and he likes baseball and bar fights and cars with moonroofs, but he does not like the astronauts, and the Eagle is landing in two days. He thinks the money could be better spent on housing or education or free beer or anything else. We're driving through Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco, and he wants to spend the day of the moon landing at Big Sur, far removed from radio and television and newspapers. He wants the Seventh House, and I know the perfect place.
He conceived this trip in the cold and snow of Boston in January. He wants to drive cross-country this summer for the first time and talks me into taking a temporary job with him over at the Cambridge labs to put together a little bankroll–vowing, promising, to avoid the farce that ended our excursion through the Maritimes the previous year, when too early on a Sunday morning he utters the singular line, "Hey, I'm doing a buck twenty and this car is coming up on me like I'm standing still," and before the blue lights come on I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to raise his bail. Ironically, the jobs we get are both sub-sub-sub-contracts for NASA. I'm hired as a printer's helper, assisting the compilation of a final manual for the Apollo 11 flight, hired because my special talent is the ability to hump fifty-pound crates of Hammermill paper to the presses all day. Dirty Don's job is to put the manual on microfiche, while moonlighting weekends behind the counter at a Winter Hill packie. Every day he suffers dozens of pinhead-sized burns on his fingers from acid splash or something, and it causes his middle finger to swell and turn black. When he flips someone the bird it's a fearsome thing. By the first of May the manuals are completed, the jobs terminated, the finger is officially out of control, we have enough dough for hash and eggs for a few months. And we have a car.
Dirty Don and I have been friends since second grade. We grew up next to each other on Winter Hill, where the population was half Irish and half Italian and everybody knew the rules. Don was running numbers for a bookie when he was eight, when he was permanently dubbed Dirty Don, and the rest of our gang weren't exactly altar boys. Don has acquired a sharp little convertible from a Winter Hill chop shop that specializes in European sports cars with altered V.I.N. numbers, taking advantage of a primitive, pre-computerized Massachusetts registry. With the cars being sold at about a quarter of book value, most of the rowdies on Winter Hill, and half the cops, are cruising around in new MGs or Healeys or Triumphs or Sunbeams. Dirty Don's MGB is like our own little yellow Saturn 5. You sit on the floor almost, with your legs flat, and let the dual carb engine do its thing. As we leave
Boston we don’t think of ourselves as Sal and Dean so much as Todd and Buzz from Route 66, although Wyatt and Billy might be the better comparison. As George Hanson would say, "Nik Nik Swomp!"
I've already made several trips across country and back and seen all the essential sights, like the Grand Canyon and Yosemite, the Alamo and Death Valley, Vegas and Juarez and TJ. The El Adobe Bar. And Little America, Wall Drug, and South of the Border. Dirty Don wants to see it all in one trip, on the way by. He has a very avant garde way of sightseeing, which is viewing things out the window while rocketing past at 70 miles an hour, without stopping. Stopping, to Don, is boring. Stopping for another speeding ticket even more so. We are taking the Southern Route, and I have some experience on which cities to skirt, like Biloxi and Beaumont, Gallup and Kingman, and which cities to hit the brakes for, like the Santas Fe and Cruz, Tucson, Moab, Chinle. We're riding easy…
I know a beach on the southern end of Big Sur. I discovered it by luck a few years back while hitchhiking through and have camped there numerous times. Don likes my description of the place and is determined that we be there on July 20. The beach is really the rough base of about four miles of sandstone cliffs hammered by wave erosion alongside Highway 1, with unlimited parking in the scrubland on top of the cliffs, and a maze of trails down to the water. The cool feature is that winter storms have carved hundreds of indentations in the cliffs, some small and some like great amphitheaters, many of them filled with driftwood logs collected over decades. I think of them as caves without ceilings. Providing privacy and windbreak, they are ideal camping sites.
We arrive late afternoon the day before the landing and find a huge cave without much litter. I commence building a campfire to cook the usual hot dogs on a stick and Dirty Don takes off down the beach to do what he does best, find girls.
Just before dark he shows up with a Valley Girl and her companion, and a cadged Ball jar of moonshine. After some dogs and shine he disappears into the night and leaves me with the second girl. She's dressed entirely in black, including a goofy hat, like The Witch of San Simeon, and has neither spoken, nor eaten, nor barely blinked, for five hours. I suspect an extra strong dose of LSD, but I'll never know. After dark I sit on the beach in the moonlight with a jug of ol' faithful buck-forty-nine-a-gallon Red Mountain wine and witness campfires appearing one by one along the beach as far as I can see.
I'm woken in dense fog, what they now call the marine layer, by a couple of ducks and three squawking geese. Dirty Don and the girls are gone but next to me in the fog is a small miracle. My fire from last night is still burning. In all my years of camping I've never had a fire burn through the night, but this one not only made it; it’s a picture-perfect campfire, a merit-badge campfire, a cover of Field and Stream campfire, with perfectly shaped tongues of alternating blue and yellow flames. The dense cedar driftwood log I used for the fire has magic, has a soul. It seems to be telling me something.
I think I'd like to find another identical chunk of cedar for tonight's fire, and there's no shortage of driftwood to choose from. But why gamble on finding the one right piece of gold? I'll collect a pile of logs and one of them is bound to be the same type of wood. The beach is covered in driftwood for miles, from little sticks and twigs to massive redwood logs buried in the sand for years, from smoky cottonwood to crackling spruce and fir, from light aspen to heavy oak, from alder kindling to slow burning maple. Every length and girth, new wood and weathered, all calling out, all wanting to be selected. I can't choose
one log over another. I'll take them all.
After an hour or so, after the sun has crested the cliffs and begun burning off the fog, I have a pile of wood that will make a modest bonfire. We'll celebrate the landing in style, maybe have a little party. A couple of moonchildren camping next door wake up and decide to join in. Dirty Don returns from his dawn honeymoon; it takes him a while to get rolling but soon enough he's all in. The tribe of fugawis on the other side see what's going on and want to pitch in. Something is happening.
More and more people start gathering logs, until around noon the pile of wood is too tall to add to and as wide as the whole cave—about the size of a basketball court. This is going to be a monumental blaze. Then, as if on cue, a whole fully uniformed Boy Scout troop from Santa Barbara, camping a mile down the beach, shows up and starts dragging huge logs in teams. For sure they weren't expecting this when they packed their aluminum canteens and mess kits. The pedantic scoutmaster points out to all that if they work together and drag or carry the logs up the trail on the gently sloped northern side of the cliff they can toss the logs on top of the pyre rather than on its sides, higher rather than wider. By default Colonel Campmaster gets to be in charge of that operation.
The walls of the cliff form a natural amphitheater on the north side, while the east and south sides are vertical and approximately 300 feet high, maybe more. By midafternoon there are well over a hundred wood gatherers and the bigger the pile gets the more energy the crowd conjures. There's no one on the beach not invested in chasing timber. Even little kids are swarming around with armfuls of branches. Fifty or so cowboys stay in the scrub above the cliff and lasso every piece of dead wood for acres, tossing the wood on top. We have hippies and yippies, yuppies and buppies, and a couple bippies in the middle. At times there are twenty Aquarians dragging a single huge log up the cliff trail to roll over the side. Directed by a phrenetic Eagle Scout, a platoon of moonbeams are amusingly trying an ersatz rope-and-pulley system for larger logs. I'm expecting a corps of seven thousand Macedonians in full battle array to rappel down the cliff at any time. All the campers merge their food and water, as well as other mental sustenance, and a group of women are making sandwiches and lemonade for those taking breaks. By dusk the pile of wood is higher than the highest cliff side, and a hundred feet wide at the base. Fourteen hours ago I began amassing a little pile of wood; now I've created a monster.
And monsters are scary. Most people gathered round have recognized me as the granddaddy of this beast and are waiting for me to light the match. Dirty Don hands me his lighter, but I have some concern. This is too massive. I think I'm about to break every environmental law in the California code and by morning will be sitting in the San Luis Obispo jail. Well, fire can scare monsters in return. In 15 minutes the entire base is ablaze and the first coals are forming. In forty-five minutes the flames reach the top of the cliff. A half-hour later the flames are twice as high as the top, nearly 800 feet tall. Standing on the beach I can feel the fire sucking the ocean air into its vortex, creating a strong cooling breeze to counteract the scorching heat of the blaze.
People are struck dumb. The north side of the cliff is girded with distant baby moon faces. The beach is a constellation of eyes reflecting orange. No one is talking. Everyone is mesmerized by the immensity of our creation, and no one is thinking about a small, white shining crescent in the heavens.
The inferno rages all night long, sometimes sounding like a locomotive, sometimes like
firecrackers at a Chinese New Year's celebration. After about six hours the blaze recedes to the top of the cliff, over red-hot embers forming a pile the size of a five-story building. And now I see a large group of arsonists throwing dozens more logs over the cliff onto the pyre -- wood that was collected earlier but couldn't be added, because there wasn't room. Each log dropping into the castle of coals causes a pillar of orange sparks to ride the heat funnel hundreds of feet in the air, accompanied by roars of approval from the psychedelically transfixed gallery. With dawn approaching, a galaxy of stoners on the beach begin singing. "You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain!" Great Balls of Fire is the morning chorus, with the squawking geese singing backup.
Goodness gracious, there's a final miracle: it's daybreak and the cops haven't arrived! There's not much nighttime traffic on Highway 1 through Big Sur, we're miles from any town, and while a few looky-loos did stop, no cops. Dirty Don smartly says we should vamoose while the vamoosing is good, so exhaustedly we crawl up the cliff trail, wipe some of the soot off our hands and faces, take down the top of the MG, and head north. We pull over at the Buck Creek scenic overlook some miles up the coast, to wash more thoroughly, and we see a plume of gray-black smoke thousands of feet above a blanket of fog -- so visible that it's going to attract every cop and fireman in the county faster than free donuts. Just before we leave, Dirty Don has an inspiration. He roots out a roll of silver duct tape from the trunk, climbs the sign on the Buck Creek bridge, and with a few small pieces of tape changes the "B" in Buck to an "F". Adios, Big Sur.
I feel Dirty Don is more than satisfied at escaping the media coverage of the Apollo Boys. We make jokes about Donte's Inferno, and hope no fools fell off the cliff in the dark; the bodies would be cremated and vaporized. We cruise through the next couple of weeks without drama. We camp out at Lime Kiln Creek among the big trees, crash with several Massachusetts expat friends in San Francisco and Berkeley, see Ike and Tina at the Fillmore, appropriately with some goofball named Arthur Brown as the opening act. We go to a wacky clothing-optional beach under the Golden Gate Bridge, spend a day hiking Mt. Tam.
A couple of weeks after the fire we're shooting pool for beers in a loggers' bar in Fort Bragg, getting torched by a pair of women who are taking us to Harry's Cleaners, when a press conference with the astronauts comes on the bar television. As the bartender turns up the volume Dirty Don has nowhere to hide. After a few pro forma questions someone asks the inevitable, "What does Earth look like from the moon?" Collins and Armstrong give their practiced raptured responses, and then our guy Buzzy chimes in with his rehearsed answer. But he ends with a question. It sounds to us like he's asking if the big fire he and Neil saw on the California coast while they were lumbering upon the moon did much damage.
Rightfully our story should end on that brain-bursting moment, but nothing is easy. We continue up the coast, camping near Eureka, and at a beautiful beach near Brookings, on the Oregon coast. Somehow, in Port Orford, Dirty Don allows history to repeat itself by getting himself arrested in a supermarket while shopping for, of course, hot dogs, for the absolutely lunatic charge of suspicion of intent to commit petit larceny. "Suspicion of intent to commit petit larceny." Suspicion of intent. Translated, it means you look like a hippie and we don't cotton to hippies around these here parts. These people have been watching way too many moonwalks. And to think if we'd headed east a day or two earlier
we could be at Woodstock.
After Don's week in jail the circuit judge shows up and sets bail at $500. What's fair is fair: I discreetly borrow a few items from my Port Orford brethren and make a pilgrimage to a pawn shop in Coos Bay. Bail gets made and bail gets jumped. Don grabs the first available stand-by seat on a plane from Portland to Boston and I get to drive the MGB solo back to Winter Hill -- which normally would be fun if my license weren't suspended in eleven states, I weren't looking over my shoulder for the Oregon constabulary, I didn't have to worry about having to drive a "hot" car, I had more than 45 bucks in my pocket for gas and food, and it didn't rain all the way. I drive the Northern Route, without stopping.
There is a coda to this narrative. After two days home I received a call from my old college football coach. Upon learning that I was back in town, and at loose ends, he recruited me back to school, back to the team. A few weeks later, on the very melancholy Thursday evening of October 23, I packed a pint of Seagram's V.O. into the pocket of my army surplus field jacket and set out hitchhiking to Lowell. I moondanced my way to the front of St. Jean's at around dawn and shared the last of the rye with an old wino sleeping on the church steps, who asked, "Jack who?" Following the service I was standing in front of the church hopelessly trying to figure out how to bum a ride to Edson Cemetery when I heard a familiar Winter Hill beep and looked up to see Dirty Don behind the wheel of the yellow MG. He said, "I knew I'd find you here." The ride to the cemetery, and back home, was my last trip in that beautiful car. Don got a job in San Diego teaching microfiche. I somehow got a degree, and the football team went undefeated and won a bowl game. And recently I took one last trip across country with Dirty Don, carrying his ashes to the west coast and distributing them in some of his favorite places.
The Taxpayers
NELL LASCH
Ramona Phipps was really contented, for the first time in her life that she could remember. She, and then she and her husband together, had had more hard times than anyone needed. But that made everything seem that much better, now. Every morning, rain or shine, she took her two little babies—the two-year-old boy, the ninemonth-old baby girl—for a long walk with the stroller. They saw the city sights of the North side of Chicago, the elegant apartment buildings, the street-repairing trucks, the shops, the people walking, the neat little grass patches in front of the smaller houses. They went to the park if it was fine; the little girl would sit bolt upright in the sandbox, shuddering fastidiously if her hands touched the sand, watching the bigger children play. The little boy would play like a mad thing; he might dawdle beside the stroller, but he ran, ran in the park. She had to see that the little girl didn’t change her mind about the sand and eat it, and she had to see that the boy didn’t get hit by the swings, or leave the little fenced-in playground altogether. In between she watched the other mothers. The Phipps’ basement apartment was small and dark, but they were this close to a decent neighborhood, finally. Most of the other mothers brought books to the park. They had smooth skin and bright hair and beautiful hands, not chalk-pale skin and lank hair and red hands, like Ramona. Lately they were even beginning to talk to Ramona, because they had seen her there so often. Ramona had taken to catching the title on this book or that one, and she herself had now read three of them, buying the paperback she knew someone at the park was reading, and reading through it at night when she didn’t have to watch the babies. No one she had ever known before had read books. Howie seemed to like to have her reading while he was sitting there reading the paper. The very air in the kitchen seemed to have sponged up some kind of contentment; all around them, after Howie’s little brother and the babies were finally asleep.
After they had spent their stint at the park (they would skip that anyway, if it was raining) Ramona would put both the children in the stroller and hurry them along the bridle path and through the tunnel under the Outer Drive, and past the missile base, out along the breakwater beside the boat harbor, all the way out to the lake. They had to leave the stroller where the path turned into a mess of broken rocks, before they could see the lake, and climb up a hill of sand that had tufts of grass silhouetted against the sky. Then the lake spread suddenly before them, huge as an ocean. It seemed to her that in showing the babies the lake so often, she was giving them, in their most impressionable days, all the advantage of the wild country, the aloneness and the room to breathe she wanted them to know they could have, and a sense of the smallness of people, too. She was so contented herself, in those days, that she lived in their perceptions, as when the baby was anxious
in the dark tunnel, as when the boy tasted awe, walking past the missile base, staring at the sentries and their leather straps, their peaked caps. The lake was the best of all. They would stay there in the wind until the children’s lips were blue with cold, and then they could turn back for home.
One day as they went by the missile base, several of the sentries were joking around; they were all such big men that they rather pleasantly excited Ramona with their horseplay, and although she had a tendency to avert her eyes from people in uniform, she stopped the stroller, almost involuntarily, to watch. Her little boy stared with big eyes. One of the men was pretending he was going to go into a large, windowless green building which stood about thirty yards inside the gate. The others were laughing, threatening him with K.P. duty, and losing his weekend pass. “Don’t forget the gas, if you don’t push today’s numbers,” one of them said.
The sentry by the gate stayed at his post, smiling at the others. But suddenly the first man put his hand on the knob of the door, and the two men joking with him stopped laughing. Ramona couldn’t tell what was going on. “Quit it,” one of them, the black man, said.
“Hands off, or I shoot,” the man at the gate said louder, still half-joking. He had a pistol on his belt and a rifle at ease by his side, as he stood there.
“Go ahead,” the first man said, making a great show of turning the knob. Suddenly all three, with a clap and a rustle, were pointing guns at the man. “Hey,” the first one said, jumping away from the door.
“That’s enough,” the gate sentry said, not smiling any more. Then he looked at Ramona. She started hastily walking on, her heart in her throat. The boy said, “What were they doing, Mom?” over and over. She was amused at herself later, for the fear she had felt until they were out of sight of the soldiers. The lake distracted the children, and calmed her, but she didn’t look at the base again, as they walked by. She wished the little boy hadn’t seen the fracas. Still, the formidableness of the place made her feel vaguely patriotic, vaguely protected and grateful, nevertheless.
It was about three months after that when Ramona changed her mind about gratitude. They had missed three days at the lake because the boy had a cold, and it was with great eagerness that they hurried through the tunnel, past the gate of the base, and down along the chain link fence. It was a gray day; the lake would be somber, with whitecaps, whitehorses she called them to the children, and large rolls and humps of water blasting into and sucking away from the massed rocks beside the little path. Perhaps if they had not, all three of them, been feeling extra contented, extra eager, it would not have been such a shock. At the end of the chain link fence was the brown water of the harbor. They could not get through. The fence had been extended, built right into the water, to close off the footpath out to the lake. There was a sign eliminating all possibility that it was some kind of mistake. “No civilian personnel past this point.” Ramona turned the stroller around, said nothing, refused to answer the children’s questions, gave the sentry at the gate a ferocious glare which was her first mistake in that direction, and marched all the way home without speaking.
They changed their routine. Every day after their time in the park they went and stood outside the missile base. Not for very long; there was nothing to see, nothing going on, and the children would become restless very quickly. No one spoke to them, and they didn’t
speak to anyone. But when Ramona was used to the place, she approached the guard, and spoke to him.
“We usually go to the lake at this time of afternoon,” she said. “You closed it off to us.”
“Not me, ma’am,” he said, smiling in a friendly fashion. “Whyn’t you walk up past the boat harbor there?”
“That’s too far to go.” Ramona frowned at the second button on his tunic. “That’s three miles.”
“Well, lady, that’s all I can say.” He yawned, right in her face. When she frowned, again, emptily, he said, “Sorry. Whyn’t you take it up with the General. Move along, would you? There’s nothing I can do about it.”
She moved along, but the days had lengthened out into something different from what they had been before. She stopped reading at night and sat there in the kitchen feeling waves of bitterness about things that had happened to them years before. It seemed to her that everything she managed to get together, ever since she was a child, would always be taken away. She began feeling old, and unbeautiful, wearing her bathrobe around the house, and telling Howie to get away, when he felt playful. Something was wrong.
One day she dressed herself up, and dressed the children, and without a word to Howie about any of it she took his service revolver in her pocketbook. She was going to get someone over there to talk to her properly. They went to the park, and she sat there on the bench looking at her feet, getting nervous, till she couldn’t stand it anymore, and then she and the children went under the tunnel, and stood by the chain link fence, staring. The children had to come with her. It was their business too.
“I want to see the man in charge,” she said to the sentry.
“I’m sorry, madam,” he said, staring at her. “We don't have anybody here who is at liberty to spend his time talking to civilian personnel. We are just keeping the installation. Just sentries here.”
“Well, where should I go then? I want to talk to someone about that fence there. One reason we moved here, we could look at the lake when we wanted.”
“I don’t know, missus. I don’t know who you could talk to. But it would do no good.”
“If I can’t see the lake,” she said all of a sudden, “I’m going to see this missile or whatever it is. We pay all those taxes, and it must be worth seeing if it’s better than the lake. Let’s see what you got in there that’s so much better than the lake. You must be doing something really good for me if I got to pay for it and stay out of it, and let it take over the whole place where I’m trying to live.”
He was so astonished that she had rolled the stroller right past him into the base before he clicked and clacked and trained the gun on her. “Hey,” he shouted, and two other men appeared, looking horrified. The stroller was almost at the door. The children were very white in the face. “Halt,” the three of them shouted. Ramona pulled out the gun, dropping the purse in the gravel at her feet. “You stay over there,” she screamed, in the voice of a harpy, “I’ve had enough, everybody takes everything, always for something else, and I don’t get none of it. My children aren’t living like that. Let’s see how that is, if we don’t just give everything over like that. There.” She got the door open, and an ear-splitting alarm, Huhwoot Huhwoot, Weeoow, burst into the air. The man closest to her gave a rush, shouting. As he came near her she (laughing so loud that it could be heard over the sirens) shot him and he, looking very surprised, fell down. Ramona pushed the stroller in through
the door, and she and the two children met and breathed in the advancing cloud of gas before their eyes could have seen anything, there in the dark shed.
The Veteran
NELL LASCH
Summit Street that morning was at its best. The huge old houses, well back from the street, seemed to have been painted and repainted by the three weeks of spring rain and sun. The leaves on the large elms were only three-quarters out so that the shade on the road (for the trees meet over the middle of Summit Street) was broken and dappled by the early morning sun; the new green grass had not yet toughened into summer grass. There was almost no sound on the street, except for the voices of a few children who had not yet left their houses for school, the occasional passing car, the intermittent bird or dog or bug sounds on the open air of a spring morning. Summit Street is the oldest street in Burlington, and the most peaceful. Despite the city ordinance the dogs run free; the little children play unsupervised from yard to yard.
I backed the car out of the driveway and started down the street, away from the summit, away from the rest of the city. On the corner by our neighborhood store, ahead of me, there was a peaceful little fuss, a couple of cars, a small group of people standing in the sun, the kind of group that spells a little excitement in a quiet neighborhood. A policeman was waving cars on past the store, over the railroad bridge. With so many trees around, the railroad bridge was our place to walk for an open view of the sky, and the long vista of the tracks. I was glad to go over the bridge instead of turning left at the little store as I had planned. I hoped no one had been hurt. And then suddenly I realized that my own two children had passed by the store on their way to school only a few minutes before; my heart lurched and pounded, and I slowed down the car to stare, to figure out. Suddenly the policeman became the formidable general of an army of disaster as he impatiently signaled at me to keep going; the white station wagon had a red light on top; the blue car was the sheriff’s car. There were no children anywhere. A young man in a very clean white shirt was lying asleep on the grass in the sun, his arms flung out; as I looked his hair stirred in the air, and he turned into a heap of clean laundry in the sun. I had to let the car keep going up over the bridge. On the bridge it was warm and quiet. The day was going on beautifully without the young man.
It really had been Ronnie Grotius, and he really had been lying dead in the grass, outside his own store. A wave of anger, sorrow, a fierce snarl of shock helped me turn the car at the first driveway. It was raw emergency to find out where my children were. I had to go back over the bridge to get to their school. The woman clerk of Ronnie’s store was standing on the curb, crying. I stopped the car and shouted at her—it came out an angry command, and she leaned into the car, whining, “Someone shot Ron.”
“Shot him—? Anyone else hurt?” I said.
“No, I don’t know. Why did they do that? When I got here the meat machine was still
going, all by itself. I came around front and found him.” Her voice and her face were watery. Knowing I should say something to her, do something, I started off again so suddenly that she had to step back, but she had lost interest in me already; I noticed in the mirror, without knowing that I was looking at her, that she went back up on the curb, and was standing there, crying.
The children were both in their classrooms; neither looked worried or shocked. So I went home.
Ronnie had been in the Korean War, and he had been far from broadened by his travels; he was only twenty-eight, and his ideas had hardened. He was unfailingly kind and chivalrous to the ladies of the neighborhood, and we were pleased to be protected and pampered for a change—the man before him had let us carry our own groceries and open our own doors and install our own fuses. He was a heroic example to our sons, and treated them as equals, and he was a humorous gentlemanly swain to the little girls. Under him the store became a local meeting place. But he didn’t want to get involved, with the people he served, or in local politics. He figured he’d make it if he sold better meat than any of the supermarkets, and it seemed to be working. The very last time I’d seen him he explained to me (not for the first time, I’m afraid—he talked to so many women that he tended to mix them up, and thus developed lines of conversation that could sustain themselves) that he would never chase a hold-up man. “They could have it all,” he said, waving his arms cheerfully. “Five hundred dollars-worth of stock, that’s all that fits in this little place. They could take it out can-by-can; I’d stand here and watch. I was in Korea. I know about guns. In the cash register, two hundred bucks. At most. I’m worth more than 600 bucks in one week. Not me. I wouldn’t be any hero.”
And there he was, lying on the grass, with the meat-slicing machine still running. The children’s only common hero—the only man around the neighborhood in the daytime. Killed in front of the only store considered safe enough for the small children to go to alone.
All the grownups of Summit Street had heard Ronnie say he would not chase a burglar with a gun. They wanted to find some meaning for his murder, so all that forenoon stories flew back and forth about people who might have wanted to kill Ronnie, people who had motives. But shortly the news came out that the man who lived in the apartment above the store had seen it all. A man and a woman had entered the store together, and the woman had run out with a paper bag, and then Ronnie and the man. Ronnie had evidently not realized that the man was with the woman, because, wiping his hands on his apron, he shouted to the man, “Come on.” He thought they were both chasing the woman, and he had almost caught her, he had spread his arms to catch her, when the cornered woman turned and shot him with a small handgun. The man watching from the window was paralyzed, could not at once understand what the “pop” meant, and he watched as the woman drove off in a car with an Ohio license plate, the man ran down the railroad tracks to the east, and Ronnie, his face astonished, sank to the grass. Since it was 8:45 on a Monday morning, the daring operation netted the bandits $86.00.
It wasn’t till the children came home, distressed, voluble, and suspicious, that I realized what had happened. The children were horrified, but not surprised, to learn that it was a woman who had killed their hero; did they not all live with a woman who managed the details, as well as most of the broad lines of their lives? One child claimed to have seen it all. When visited by the police it seemed he had only seen a speeding car with a woman in
it turning the corner by the school. But the children were sure that the murderess would come back to “get” this boy who had “squealed”. My own son, jittering, asked me, as I tried to settle him down at bedtime, how he could be sure I hadn’t done it. I didn’t laugh at him. Those children had a prejudice about women—that they are powerful, efficient, dangerous. Ron had died for his unthinking attitudes; that a woman was not a serious adversary, that women do not carry guns, that they cannot evade two men in determined chase. Unlike the children, who so easily suspected others’ and even their own mothers of being able to shoot a man, Ron had been surprised; if he had had time, perhaps he would have changed his mind about a lot of things.
Best Seat in the House
JACK M c DONOUGH
Ihad the best seat in the house at Fenway Park.
I was in a rooftop chair behind home plate with a clear view of the entire field. I was in the press box.
I was a kid in a candy store.
It was 1967 and I worked for a news wire service, United Press International. I had been with UPI six years by that time, working mostly in the Boston news room. We had a regular sports editor but a couple of the news staff occasionally covered events like golf, tennis and college football.
But the prize assignment, for me anyway, was covering the Red Sox.
Those were the days of names like Carl “Yaz” Yastrzemski, Tony Conigliaro, Rico Petrocelli, Jim Lonborg, Reggie Smith and Ken “Hawk” Harrelson.
Dick Williams was the manager and the coaching staff included the Sox’ former All Star second baseman Bobby Doerr, and Sal “The Barber” Maglie, who pitched for several teams and supposedly earned the nickname for giving batters a close shave with his fastball.
The Sox went to the World Series that year, Williams’ first as Boston manager. They lost to the St. Louis Cardinals in seven games but that’s a sad story for another day.
The story today is about the thrill of a young man going through the Fenway Park press gate with credentials in hand and walking up the first set of stairs to field level. The initial view of that gorgeous expanse of emerald green grass was breathtaking. Every time. Then came the climb to the press box, carrying that badge of the profession, the portable typewriter.
The press box today has moved much higher and is now on the third base side. Reporters see the action through large windows and do their writing on laptops. I went up there on a tour a few years ago and didn’t much like it. Too high. Too far away.
Sports writers in my era sat out in the open where you had to watch out for foul balls. Proof of that dangerous possibility came in the form of a dent in our sports writer’s typewriter. The press corps then included such local newspaper luminaries as Clif Keane, Bill “Jake” Liston, Tim Horgan, Ray Fitzgerald and Will McDonough, among others.
Keane was known to shout down at opposing players during pre-game warmups. On one such occasion his taunts brought a few baseballs careening through the press box. The targeted player had a good arm.
The job of actually covering the game was as challenging as it was thrilling for me. The game of professional baseball may seem leisurely to the fan in the grandstand, but when covering the game alone in the press box it can accelerate quickly, especially in the late innings when pinch hitters emerge from the dugout and relief pitchers trot in from the
bullpen.
The game story was usually brief, probably only 150 or 200 words, but we had to phone it in immediately after the final out. The call was placed directly to the UPI sports desk in New York.
But the writing wasn’t the toughest part.
The most difficult part was keeping all the statistics. At bats, hits, runs, errors and every other number. Plus the statistics for the starter and any relief pitchers. How many innings did each work, how many runs, how many earned runs, how many strikeouts?
At the end, when you phoned in the game, the staffer who took your call would keep you on the phone until he “proved” your numbers. There was a formula for that. You held your breath until he finally said, “OK. It’s good. Have a nice night.”
One night that didn’t happen. One night the numbers didn’t add up. The stands had emptied, the lights were going out and the press box was almost empty. Only one other writer was left. Nearing panic, I called to him. “Frank, my numbers are off. I’m a third of an inning short on pitchers.” And Frank, bless his heart, scanned my work and said, “You missed a reliever. He threw to only one batter and got him out.”
How could I possibly have done that? In the heat of the moment, easily.
The fun part was visiting the locker room and talking with players who for me had been, until then, only names from stories that others had written. And, some of the coaches, like Doerr, had been legendary when I was in high school.
Sometimes the post-game visit included a stop in the manager’s office to ask for his views of the game. I found one of those sessions a bit awkward when Dick Williams appeared, post shower, wearing nothing but a towel around his neck. You had to ask questions while gazing at the wall. It was an unusual press conference.
Over the years, journalism brought me to many places and into the company of many fascinating people. It ran the gamut.
But if I could go back in time, which experience would I choose? No question. There I’d be. Trudging up that stairway to the Fenway press box. Typewriter in hand. The heart beating just a little faster.
Welcome to Witassic
CHAZ SCOGGINS
Welcome to Witassic, Massachusetts. My Town. We’d have liked to have referred to it as Our Town, but some hamlet up in New Hampshire, oh, about 72 miles due north of here as the carrier pigeon used to fly, already laid claim to that nickname. Threatened to sue us if we did. That’s why no family in Witassic names its sons Thornton, and the only Wilder family in town drove all the way to Springfield and petitioned to have its name legally changed to Tamer. But we’re small enough and proud to describe Witassic to outsiders as My Town because everybody knows everybody, nobody knows nobody, and here we prize individualism over collectivism.
Witassic is nestled deep in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, close enough to Stockbridge that some folks go over on Saturdays to eat lunch at Alice’s Restaurant but far enough off the beaten path that we’re hard to find unless you know where to look. We’re not on any maps or GPS, and there’s only one road in and out of My Town. In fact, we’re so small that the signs at both ends of town read “Entering Witassic” and “Leaving Witassic” on the same side. I guess that’s why the only motel in My Town is named the Stumble Inn. There’s no need for a traffic light. We don’t even have stop signs since Massachusetts motorists ignore them anyway. We also don’t have a Dalmatian to ride shotgun in the town’s only fire truck down at the all-volunteer fire house but do keep a framed picture of one on the front seat. I don’t know whether it’s absolutely true or not, but some say Witassic can lay claim as the “Smallest Small Town in America.”
Don’t be misled. We’re small, but Witassic is an active and thriving community, and there is always something interesting going on during all three seasons of the year. You read that right. Witassic, like the rest of New England outside of Maine, only has three seasons: winter, summer, and autumn. Spring is only a myth. Heck, we all know February has only twenty-eight or twenty-nine days, but around these parts the month of March is anywhere from 51 to 83 days long. Winters are long and harsh; there’s no denying that. But we have a newcomer here who used to live way up in Jackman, Maine, who said he wanted to retire somewhere warmer in the south and is grateful for three seasons. He said there are only two seasons down in Maine: snow flies and black flies.
We get quite a few tourists from the Canadian provinces too. When they stop at the last Flying A filling station in America to gas up on their way to Florida and stretch their legs, they sometimes wander over to Grandma Winslow’s Olde Antiques Shoppe right next door and read the sign that informs them there are other locations in Miami, West Palm Beach, Boca Raton, and Orlando. They think they must already be in Florida, so they tend to stick around for a few weeks. We don’t have the heart to tell them any different, or that Grandma Winslow doesn’t even own any other stores. Honestly, it helps that there’s a road
sign north of here that reads “Florida, 22 miles.” That’s Florida, Massachusetts, of course, another tiny town in the Berkshires so remote that if you fail to negotiate the hairpin turn on Route 2 you’re guaranteed to miss it. But when it comes to tourists, the unofficial town motto of Witassic is: “If they don’t ask, don’t tell.” And, frankly, our little economy can use the loonies. Good jobs can be tough to find.
The two biggest employers in My Town are the Witassic Casket Company and the Witassic Gasket Company. Luke Tamer, our postmaster who doesn’t see very well and out of vanity refuses to wear specs, often gets confused and delivers mail to the wrong business, particularly when people with sloppy handwriting either leave an unintended ink blot on or near the bottom arc of the C in Casket or don’t finish off the hook of the G in Gasket. It happens more often than you think, especially now that cursive handwriting is no longer taught in schools. The company motto for the coffin maker is “You’ll go out in style, and you’ll never be out of style for all eternity in a Witassic Casket.” The gasket company doesn’t have an official motto, but the unofficial one by its employees is “Our product is so good we prevent leaks by the CIA.”
My Town is proud of its coexistence with nature. We are located at the foot of Mount Witassic, notable for having the most and shortest bunny trails of any ski area in North America and one of the last rope tows in existence. Some critics insist it’s not a mountain at all because it’s not at least 300 meters high and Mount Witassic is only 71 meters, which includes the ranger station on the summit to watch for forest fires and its radio tower. But the USGS says there is no exact measurement that turns a molehill into a mountain, and we heartily concur with the geologists.
The Town Forest features 250 acres of Bonsai Trees, but children under the age of thirteen are no longer permitted to enter because careless youngsters were trampling too many of them underfoot. An oak tree, not in the Town Forest but on the edge of town, played an important role in early American history. Chiefs from the largely peaceful Witassic and warlike Mohawk tribes, and later on early colonists to the region, held pow wows beneath this mighty tree to iron out their respective differences. In the 1920s the state designated it a historical site and erected a marker to honor the Powwow Oak. Then, a few short years ago, a snowplow knocked down the marker, and the Powwow Oak was rededicated with a new one. Less than two weeks later a huge limb fell off the 350-year-old tree, and a tree surgeon determined the tree was dead and had to come down. The marker is still standing, and so is the Powwow Stump.
There is plenty of wildlife in the environs of My Town, but hunting season lasts only one week in October, and it’s a scavenger hunt, a tradition and one of the most popular activities in Witassic. The list of items to be scavenged changes from year to year with the exception of the coveted Knitting Needle in a Haystack. (A sewing needle would be too hard to find.) Whoever combs through the haystacks and finds it is crowned King (or Queen) Knit-Wit and is paraded around the town square in an antique ducking chair from Colonial times that was used to drown witches.
Everyone looks forward to the annual Witassic Classic, when the PMGA—the Professional Mini-Golf Association’s Tour—comes to My Town in June. It is billed as the Masters of Mini-Golf, because some of the most challenging mini-golf courses in the world are right here in Witassic and feature multitudes of mini-bunkers and mini-water hazards. The toughest mini-golf hole in the entire world is the infamous 14th, popularly known as
the Dragon’s Mouth, on Mount Witassic’s rugged Alpine Course. The fairway between the tee and green is forty-eight inches long but only an inch and a half wide and flanked by pits of flaming propane gas on both sides. Many a tournament has been won—and lost—on this hole. In addition to a sizable purse, the winner of the Witassic Classic is presented with a green parka. The Fourth of July is highlighted by the Witassic Sparkler Festival. We take safety seriously in My Town, and fireworks are prohibited, just as they are everywhere in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. So, prizes are awarded to those whose modified sparklers burn the longest or are the most colorful. Last year’s top prize went to an elevenyear-old girl whose sparkler had all the colors of the rainbow and burned for a record three minutes and twenty-three seconds.
Interscholastic athletics are immensely popular. Witassic High School has the smallest student body in New England so doesn’t get much statewide recognition for its sports programs. Winning seasons are understandably rare for the Wits, although one of our wrestlers made it all the way to the second round of the state tournament several years ago. But Wits events are always well attended and often sold out. Even the Witassic Middle School’s sports are popular as fans turn out in large numbers to cheer on the Half-Wits. Oh, I could go on about My Town, but I won’t. We’re pretty proud here of our habit of not flapping our lips unnecessarily. But if you’re looking for a place where you can escape reality, believe me when I tell you Witassic is the perfect place to be. And to the good folks in Peterborough and Lake Wobegon, I say eat your hearts out!
The Elusive Nature of British Punk
MALCOLM SHARPS
You say you wan’ a revolution. Well, you know, we all wanna change the world. “Revolution”—John Lennon
An article caught my attention recently, a caustic one written by Julie Burchill about the late clothes designer Vivienne Westwood, a frequent collaborator with the much higher profile Malcolm McLaren: the main writer on British Punk was demolishing the reputation of the main designer of British Punk attire in a belated revenge article, virtually dancing on her still-warm grave. The rest of the punk and fashion scene was also shown scant reverence in the article. If you’ve only just arrived, it might not be too clear what is really going on.
Given its nature, punk was hardly ever likely to entice the Cyril Connollys and Kenneth Tynans of the world to write about it. Media get the level of criticism they deserve and Punk got the coverage it deserved with Julie Burchill as near to a literary doyen as it was ever likely to attract; in her pieces from a very early age, she produced muscularly secure prose and was capable of setting off the odd fire cracker of language. Burchill wrote as well on punk as it ever deserved. But many things come to an end and Julie Burchill didn’t just grow out of punk; as is often the case with crazy love viewed in the sobriety of its aftermath, she made a 180-degree turn, she tossed it onto the acridly smoldering bonfire of memory. Today Julie Burchill is sixty-three years old, has abandoned punk worship completely and, to coin a phrase, now writes her age.
It is a curiosity of Punk, and a rarer one than at first appears, that it started out primarily as a music movement and in retrospect the music comprises a fairly negligible part of its legacy, surpassed by the visual and fashion side of the phenomenon, the merchandising of clothes, the hairstyles, etc.; and a philosophy which has proved elusive to pin down in the many books and articles articulating its subtleties and far from subtleties. These books, to a sentence, emphasize punk’s cultural and social revolutionary significance and, more often than not in the process, exaggerate its true philosophical weight and coherence. If punk seems like all things to all pundits now; in its own time, punk was the cultural movement that wholesale believed its own publicity.
The cultural phenomenon which originated from punk rock was characterized by antiestablishment views and the promotion of individual freedom. Wiki tells us:
The punk ethos was primarily made up of beliefs such as non-conformity, anti-authoritarianism, anti-corporatism,
a do-it-yourself ethic, anti-consumerist, anti-corporate greed, direct action, and not “selling out”. Early British punks expressed nihilistic and anarchist views with the slogan No Future, which came from the Sex Pistols song “God Save the Queen”.
To be clear, yes, punk was about a certain sound, but when it comes to an inventory, The Punk Book of Memorable Numbers is a slim one; it’s a folded hymn sheet, at most; punk music gets snagged on its own contradictions: its main appeal is through sounding tacky and disposable through the ramblings of its untutored performers. Such music soon palls and we—logically—dispose of it. And there’s a secondary contradiction operating here too: if a tune is hummable and individual, if it’s ‘catchy’, if it gets your foot tapping, rather than your head banging, whatever it might be, it’s no longer punk. If punk can be said to be about music; it’s more accurate to state it’s not about individual musical numbers but a blur of noise which we can all recognize instantly. Punk music is distinguished by what Julie Burchill nowadays calls ‘a racket’.
I’m not sure at what point in time Burchill became disillusioned with punk, but by 1990 she came out with this rant in the Guardian newspaper: . . . punk—the whitest, malest, most asexual music ever—should have been left to die an unnatural death. I’d been a punk, and knew that the whole thing was, frankly, shit in safety pins. We came to bury the music industry; we ended up giving it one almighty shot in the arm.
The last comment is very telling: anti-music itself became a form of music. I wouldn’t normally condemn a thing from a color perspective, but in Britain we see this punk “whiteness” was coincident with a certain age-group from a certain layer of society: lower middle class, single child, smart rebelling male under-achievers, mostly still living at home, aka spoilt brats.
Two patent facts need mentioning at this point: Punk started in the United Kingdom, and all punks then and all punks subsequently are young. Unlike rockers, somehow punks never grow old, they just fade away. Less clearly, these two facts are connected. Why were punks first in the UK? Why not in Brazil, why not in Surinam? Why not in Moldova? Let’s skip several hundred years of British Social History, and allow that though it plays a part, say, ten percent, the crucial decider, the remaining ninety percent, is about the latter part of the twentieth century in the United Kingdom.
Up until recent times, society had demanded conformity, compliance, passivity, and a predisposition for fitting in; and nowhere more so than in the workplace. That meant conformity in attitudes, conformity in behavior, conformity in dress. Young men went trepidatiously to job interviews praying that the hair they had just had punitively cropped wouldn’t be considered outlandishly long, or that the shine on their shoes they had polished in a crazy sweat wouldn’t be judged too subdued. They worried that the suit they had pressed with such meticulous care wouldn’t acquire creases. A wage depended on these things, failure meant starvation or a life of crime or exploitation in some form. But not so by the punk era. Punk was the illegitimate child of the British Social Security system; the Department of Health and Social Security underwrote job interview failure. It provided life support money for the unemployed, it covered accommodation costs too, it covered full medical expenses through the National Health Service. Through their choice
of dress, punks, with the exception of a very small minority who formed full-time bands, largely made themselves unemployable. They were the way they wanted to be, not the way most employers expected of prospective staff. As a result, they weren’t taken on for work. Nevertheless, punks didn’t starve, they didn’t go homeless, they even had money to acquire more ripped jeans and chains and crudely printed tee-shirts. Through the welfare payments from the DHSS, the punk lifestyle was made viable. Perhaps peculiarly, they were not required to dress more conventionally in order to become employable. In the British 1970s, to do so might have been considered excessively authoritarian and illiberal. If the DHSS had decided the other way, history might have been different, punk might never have come into existence and flourished. Punks have never shown either recognition or gratitude for this. But anyway, the latter word isn’t in their vocabulary.
When punk first came on the scene, I was the contributor on classical music to a youth-orientated monthly entertainments magazine covering a failing British Midlands industrial town; in other words, an outsider in a group of outsiders. From time to time, punks turned up at the magazine’s office where I sometimes worked. I was intrigued and daunted by the appearance of the first wave: tight black strategically torn jeans, safety pins, chains, spiked wrist bangles; not yet with so many facial tattoos as later. It took a time before I finally got up the courage to speak to one. So many punks are a surprise, contradicting their hostile appearances; sweet young men, sometimes a bit fey, who are polite, unabrasive and speak in grammatical English that promises they have something worth saying; they are often slight and under-nourished in appearance suggesting no direct physical threat. The girls smile shyly and look askance if you talk to them, never into your eyes; they are quiet and self-conscious, even awkward, as if they realize this is primarily a male cult they happen to be around. Significantly, they dress similarly to the men and don’t have much of their own identifiable gendered attire, apart from short tartan skirts, an item unique in punk couture worn without subjection to defacement.
Swastikas are one of the biggest problems with punks, if not the biggest, and not just because of their social unacceptability. It gives the sociologists and social pundits a headache integrating their interpretation of where the swastika belongs in the punk ethos along with their interpretations of other aspects of punk. You can over-interpret the swastikas and sound smart—or not sound so smart—about them. But by so doing, we fall into the trap of treating punk as a real philosophy, when it’s too incoherent for that, or to treat it as a movement, when it has no clear set of aims, only an assortment of stances. The principle, for me, is a simple one: if you want to outrage mom and dad by taking a route that costs you no change in lifestyle, nothing works better than wearing a tee-shirt with a swastika print around the house. And when the intended outrage is generated, parents shout and forbid, tempers and voices are raised in the home, the kids feel they are oppressed, they then feel truly punk. It is confirmation, at last, of who they are. Hey, cool! But, swastikas apart, there is a natural overlap of Naziism and Punk. Like Nazis, punks eschew the more tender, caring feelings expressed by humanity towards others, as signs of weakness. It’s a classic defensive response of the weak. Like Nazis, punks celebrate gratuitous violence; the much-repeated exhortation to destroy has echoes of the more extreme pronouncements of the fascist-affiliated art movement, Futurism, whose leader, Marinetti, co-wrote the Fascist Manifesto. But, again, this may be to fall into the trap of treating punk as a serious, coherent philosophy. Some may justify the punk excesses as
just a bunch of kids playing around and being outrageous. But surely it reached an all-time moral low when one punk band called itself the Moors Murderers. For my readers who do not know, the original Moors murderers was a couple of serial killers who abducted children and tortured them to death. But maybe that was no more than par for those willfully insensitive times, where Manchester New Wave group Joy Division could name itself after the forced prostitution service in the Nazi concentration camps. These kids play rough, don’t they?
For a time, far-right movements in England did try to recruit Nazi-leaning punks – a very small minority of punks as a whole – with a degree of success. But it was a small enough group to be only a peripheral worry. The traditional working class skinhead recruitment was far more significant and alarming. But one looks in vain for expressions of sympathy with those not in the cult of punkism. One looks in vain for expressions of sympathy with the really weak, the uncool weak, the deprived from multi-generational poor, uneducated families, the sick and the old. Even the Winterhilfswerk, the Nazi aid organization, showed compassion to these, though it was initially opposed by hardline elements within the party because they said it would make German society turn soft.
Back to music, ‘the brandy of the damned’. Let me describe to you my only actual engagement with punk, an experience which is still oddly resonating with me. Inevitably, the entertainments magazine covered punk rock concerts. Inevitably, I got invited to deafening gigs in dark, sweaty, cramped bars, which I really enjoyed. These were my young man’s years too. Inevitably, there were band interview articles for the magazine.
Breaking down a thirty-minute interview and coming up with around 3,000 words for an article is WORK, believe me, much more demanding than writing so many words out of the top of your head. And unless the first twenty-five minutes of the interview are useless trash which you discard and you work through the final five minutes, it means a good long half-day of selecting, cutting and stitching. When he saw the size of the task ahead, the band interviewer wanted to drop the whole thing. As the nominal co-editor of the magazine, I stood in a notional line of responsible volunteers ready to take on the task and, like the old comedy sketch, all the others in the line took one step back and I was left as sole volunteer.
But when I read the interview text, I wasn’t disappointed at all: the interview was a new phenomenon for me; in cutting it, I was developing a new skill. Anyway, the interview was jumping hot, it was full of young male aggression, it was full of disdain, it was full of words we needed to partly blank out, but didn’t. The band, I’ll call them The J. so as not to confuse them with a later successful American band of the same name, hated everything that was ordinary, conventional and settled. I remember one particular phrase that was used; they blasted working people as ‘lobotomized navvies’ whom they had no wish to reach with their music. They had seen through the deceptions by which society controls and deceives us and they felt contempt, rather than pity, for those who had fallen into the trap of the system and remained there. Contempt, not sympathy, for the losers and suckers in the system: The J. were pure punk.
Naturally, in the spirit of true professional journalism, I kept as many eyebrow-raising statements as possible in the article. Still, at the end I regretted having to drop so many words to arrive at a word count of around 3 K. The galleys were pasted up and the artwork went off to our regular printers in Manchester, a Marxist collective, a group with clear
political objectives, offering their services dirt-cheap to people of like minds and like aims. After an ominously brief time, as if it had been read once only on arrival and returned in the next post, the piece came back to us not merely with a refusal but with a series of conditions which left us bound hand and foot. Our piece was considered hostile to the working class and expressed attitudes contrary to the aims of the printing collective. The collective was not prepared to negotiate on this, nor discuss it in any way. Any attempted dispute or correspondence questioning their decision not to print would be met with silence. Repeated attempts to dispute their decision would lead to the withdrawal of their services from future articles of any kind presented by our magazine. Here is a selection from a dozen or more conditions.
A reworked article with comments would not be acceptable.
A reworked article drawing attention to the fact that the original had been turned down by the collective would not be acceptable.
The article with gaps for censored material, if resubmitted, would not be accepted. In fact, no part of the article, if resubmitted, would be accepted.
If the article either in the original or a changed form appeared with another printer, even if attention was not drawn to the fact that the collective had refused to print this article, their services would be withdrawn from future articles presented by our magazine.
I got from this communication something of the flavor of living in a totalitarian state, the absolutism of its decision, the impression that a guard stood blocking all routes of opposition. I was shaken and felt an irrational proprietorship for both the entity and the views expressed in an article I had only edited.
But why should our magazine worry? Because the collective was cheap. In fact, at least half the price of the nearest competition; their workers really did give their all for a pittance fighting to reach the goal of the Communist Paradise. To be honest, at first I wasn’t sure if the collective’s protest was against punk itself or the way the article undermined and distorted their cause. But later I saw how it couldn’t be the latter. Up until then I had naively accepted punk as a movement of protest, it was against the current social order, it was against the exploitative nature of capitalism, and I simply assumed it must stand shoulder to shoulder with the greater struggle of the masses, with the rural tractor drivers, the spanner wielders, the plumbers and brickies. But it turned out punks were deemed to be unlikely ’fellow travelers’ by Marxists. I should have known; punk is antithetical to organization, as all anarchy is. But Marxism is organizationally obsessed, centrally commanded to an oppressive degree. Read your Darkness at Noon.
The truth is, this movement of nihilists was viewed as comrades to no one, it was infantile, incoherent and vituperative; furthermore, it didn’t offer alternatives to the state it rejected, while at the same time it parasitized that hated state as a permanent recipient of its handouts; it was the ultimate self-deluded dependency culture. To join with the Marxists, or even the much less extreme Labor Party, would mean having an understanding of, and taking an interest in, politics, joining in discussions, taking stands, engaging with similar and opposing views. My God, it would mean punks would have to take on the role of grown-ups! I don’t think Tinker Bell could survive that!
What was punk really all about? Those involved are still wondering. That period was fun, it was crazy, Julie Burchill very often recalls, though for decades she has looked back in anger at Punk’s insubstantial and dubious heritage and made a good living from negating
it. And maybe looking back and saying “How could I have been taken in?” is also for many an essential part of what the phenomenon was about. The faux pop intelligentsia bought into the naïve view of punk, that it was a spontaneous development out of a combined roots culture, making it pure, putting it beyond question. So when it said nothing, it was acceptable; when it voiced obscenities, it was acceptable; when it spoke nonsense, it was acceptable; when it contradicted itself, both sides of the contradiction were also acceptable. With punk, we are always falling into the trap of thinking it was serious, considered, coherent, consistent, substantial. When it was none of those things and all along it was flagrantly, raucously and deafeningly trying not to be.
Contributors
Michael Ansara spent many years as an activist and an organizer. He is the co-founder of Mass Poetry. He serves on the Board of the Redress Movement and the organizing team for Volunteer Blue. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and his essays have appeared in Vox, Arrowsmith, Solstice, and Cognoscenti. His first book of poems, What Remains, was published in June of 2022 by Kelsay Books. He is working on a memoir.
Kathleen Aponick’s poetry collections include Descendant’s Notebook and Near the River’s Edge. She lives in Andover, MA.
Susan April grew up in the Highlands section of Lowell and later in the Collinsville area of Dracut, MA. Her work has appeared in A Tether to This World: Stories and Poems About Recovery and When Home is Not Safe. Her essay “Chair Pickerel” (Collateral Journal ) about fishing with her dad at Long-Sought-for-Pond in Westford was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Javy Awan of Salem, MA, is a poet and the publisher of Derby Wharf Light Box books. He has been published in Potomac Review, Innisfree Poetry Journal, and the London-based Long Poem Review.
Jerry Bisantz is the Artistic Director of Image Theater in Lowell. He is a published playwright, a director, producer, actor, and singer, and filmmaker, and has served on the Board of Directors of Playwrights’ Platform of Boston, The Hovey Players, and he serves on the Lowell Cultural Council. He can be found at https//:www.Jerrybisantz.com
Alan S. Bridges of Westford, MA, began writing haiku in 2008 after meeting acclaimed poet John Stevenson, editor of The Heron’s Nest, on a cross-country train trip. Since then, his haiku have been published in anthologies and journals. He won first prize in the Irish Haiku Society International Competition in 2012, and in 2014 an award for excellence in the 25th ITO EN Oi Ocha Shinhaiku Contest (for which his haiku appeared on bottles of ITO EN green tea). His haiku collections include In a Flash and In the Curves
Naomi Chanlina Chum is a member of the Cambodian American Literary Arts Association of Lowell. This is her first appearance in The Lowell Review
William C. Crawford is a prolific itinerant photographer based in Winston Salem, NC. He invented Forensic Foraging, a minimalist approach for contemporary digital shooters.
He seeks to elevate mundane subjects to pleasing eye candy through use of basic techniques made famous by the New York School of photographers, including creative framing, heavy color saturation, and selective use of monochrome images. He got his start as a combat photojournalist in Vietnam where he was mentored by three Pulitzer Prize winners. He has published four books featuring his images and stories. Forensic Foraging: Unlocking the Unseen with Photographs was an Amazon Best Seller. His work can be viewed at @bcraw44 on Instagram. Contact him at bcraw44@gmail.com
David Daniel’s most recent book is Beach Town, a collection of stories. He reviews books and the arts for the Boston Arts Fuse and is a regular contributor to the RichardHowe.com blog. He is a contributing editor of this magazine. He can be reached at daviddaniel67@gmail.com
Dave Deinnocentis has lived in the Merrimack Valley for five decades. A youthful enthusiasm for a certain native son of Lowell led to eighty-two drives and hitchhikes across country horizontally, east to west, and countless more vertically. And counting . . .
Sonia Dickson, cover artist for this issue, lives in Lowell. She graduated with a BFA from the University of Massachusetts Lowell in 1994 and now teaches Design and Visual Communications at Greater Lowell Technical High School. She enjoys urban sketching and captures moments of her day in illustration pen and watercolor often incorporating short descriptions into the artwork.
Rick Harvey was born in Lowell and graduated from Dracut High School in 1973. After a career on the professional staff, he retired from UMass Lowell in 2017. He loves all sports, including the street hockey that he writes about in this issue, but baseball is his passion. He played at the youth league, high school, and American Legion levels before three years of college ball at now-UMass Lowell. For 27 years, he served the Hudson, N.H., Post 48 American Legion team as manager and general manager. Today, he is State Chair of American Legion Baseball in NH.
Doug Holder is the founder of the Ibbetson Street Press of Somerville, MA, and is the arts editor of The Somerville News. He teaches writing at Endicott College in Beverly, MA, and Bunker Hill Community College in Boston.
Richard P. Howe, Jr., is co-editor of The Lowell Review. His books include Legendary Locals of Lowell and a history of veterans’ organizations in the city. He also co-edited History as It Happens: Citizens Bloggers in Lowell, Mass., which features the best writing from the first ten years of the RichardHowe.com blog.
Paul Hudon is still wondering how a doctorate in European intellectual history (Georgetown ’73) plus ten years’ study of preindustrial textile production in the U.S. brought him to propose a novel iteration in the biology.technology symbiosis that characterizes the entire lifetime of our species. But he’s sure his history of the valley of the lower Merrimack had something to do with it (the illustrated volume The Valley & Its Peoples).
Paul Ilechko is a British American poet and occasional songwriter who lives with his partner in Lambertville, NJ. His work has appeared in The Bennington Review, The Night Heron Barks, and Permafrost, as well as in several chapbooks.
Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, now residing in Charlottesville, Virginia, Tami Martin Keaveny is the Culture editor at C-VILLE Weekly newspaper. She uses her more than twenty-five years of public relations and marketing experience in live music and performing arts to cover arts, living, and food and drink stories in central Virginia. She is the daughter of musician Bob Martin, the subject of a special tribute and remembrance in this issue of The Lowell Review
Lucy Larcom (1824-1893), one of ten children of Benjamin and Lois Larcom of Beverly, MA, wrote and self-published collections of her poems as a child. When her father died in 1832, her mother was hired as a boarding house manager in Lowell, where 11-year-old Lucy and her siblings worked in the booming textile mills. She contributed poems to the Lowell Offering, a magazine, produced by young women mill workers. She would go on to write popular memoirs, An Idyll of Work and A New England Girlhood, and well-received collections of poetry, including Wild Roses of Cape Ann. An editor of magazines and books, she was a teacher at Wheaton Female Seminary, now-Wheaton College, and before that for a time in rural Illinois. Larcom collaborated with author John Greenleaf Whittier of Amesbury, MA, on several editorial projects. In downtown Lowell, Lucy Larcom Park honors her, and Larcom Mountain, near Ossipee, New Hampshire, a favorite destination of hers, is named for the poet.
Nell Lasch (1934-2024) is the author of the short fiction collection Safe and Sound where the two stories in this issue of The Lowell Review first appeared. Her other books include Born Again, Sideways, All the Advantages, and Wouldn’t That Be Nice (for children). She was a longtime resident of Vermont.
Tom Laughlin is a professor at Middlesex Community College (Lowell and Bedford, MA) where he teaches creative writing and literature and coordinates the Visiting Writers Series. His work has appeared in Green Mountains Review, Molecule, and Blue Mountain Review. His chapbook is The Rest of the Way
Henri Marchand worked for the City of Lowell as Assistant to the City Manager, Special Events Coordinator and Director of Cultural Affairs. Prior to that, he served in UMass Lowell’s Public Affairs Office as the producer of the Sunrise radio program and as staff associate in Community Relations. A graduate of Harvard University, he serves on the Dracut Historic Commission and Dracut Cultural Council and is a volunteer for the American Diabetes Association Tour de Cure cycling event. His interests include gardening, golfing, and writing.
Paul Marion is an editor of The Lowell Review. He is the author of the poetry collections Union River and Lockdown Letters & Other Poems and editor of the early writing of Jack Kerouac, Atop an Underwood. The publisher of Loom Press books, he lives in Amesbury, Mass.
A Tewksbury, Mass., resident since 1968, Jack McDonough earned a B.A. degree in English from St. Anselm College and a master’s in Journalism from Boston University before completing the Navy’s officer candidate program and serving three years aboard an aircraft carrier. His career track then included writing and editing positions with United Press International, New England Telephone, Brandeis University and UMass Lowell.
Matt W. Miller, born and raised in Lowell, is the author of Tender the River, shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. His other poetry collections include The Wounded for the Water and Cameo Diner. He teaches English and coaches football at Phillips Exeter Academy in NH.
Helena Minton’s recent book is Paris Paint Box: New and Selected Poems. A former librarian, she lives in Andover, MA. She is on the board of directors of the Robert Frost Foundation in Lawrence, MA.
Bill O’Connell lives in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. His books of poetry include When We Were All Still Alive and Sakonnet Point. He’s a graduate of UMass Lowell and Colorado State University, where he studied with poet Bill Tremblay, also a contributor to this issue.
Christine O’Connor is completing a collection of literary-themed essays, and a memoir centered on the Titanic. Her work has appeared in Atlantic Currents, Maine Boat Magazine, Beir Bua Press, as a presenter at the Annual Gathering Thoreau Society (2021), and as a contributor at the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference (2023). She serves as an editor of Trasna, an online literary journal. She holds an M.A. in American Studies from Boston College, a J.D. from Suffolk University, and is pursuing an MFA (low residency) at Bennington College, (2024-2026). She serves as Town Counsel for North Andover, Massachusetts.
Stephen O’Connor is the author of five books, most recently, Northwest of Boston, a collection of stories set primarily in Lowell, Massachusetts.
Louise Peloquin was born at Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Lowell where her father, Laval U. Peloquin, was a surgeon then radiologist. Her mother, journalist Marthe Biron Peloquin, a Franco-American community leader, transmitted to her a passion for the FrenchCanadian bilingual heritage. She studied at Assumption (BA) and Middlebury (MA French, MA Spanish and Doctorate in Modern Languages) and at the University of Paris (Ph.D. in sociolinguistics with a thesis on Franco-Americans). She pursued a universityteaching, academic research and language coaching career starting in the U.S. then in France, where she published two books on the Franco-American cultural heritage.
Marianne Donahue Perchlik lives with her husband in Vermont where she is a teacher and pedagogical leader at the Orchard Valley Waldorf School. The mother of three grown children, she is a singer and songwriter. She was born and raised in Lowell and enjoys bringing groups of eighth graders for tours of the Lowell Parks.
George Perreault grew up in Dracut, MA, and has a master’s degree from UMass Lowell. Young Jack Kerouac worked as a pin boy in the bowling alley that his dad ran downstairs at the Pawtucketville Social Club. Perreault has five collections of poetry, most recently Lie Down as You Were Born. He won the Charles Simic Prize for poetry in 2023.
Veteran journalist and music wiseman Dave Perry recently closed out a wildly successful run with his record shop, Vinyl Destination, in Mill No. 5 in Lowell.
Chath pierSath is a writer, visual artist, and a farmer who lives in Massachusetts. He is the author of three collections of poetry including On Earth Beneath Sky. Born in Cambodia in 1970, he survived the Khmer Rouge genocide and grew up in the U.S. His art has been shown in Europe, Asia, and American cities.
Jim Provencher grew up in Portland, Maine, and has lived in Australia since 1986. A former U.S. Army journalist, he is a past contributor to the RichardHowe.com blog and The Lowell Review. He’s been active in the Sydney performance poetry scene and was poet-inresidence at the Glenaeon School.
Emilie-Noelle Provost lives in Lowell with her husband and three crazy rescue cats. A former magazine editor, she is author of The Blue Bottle, a middle grade adventure set on the New England coast. Her second novel The River Is Everywhere (2023), the coming-of-age story of a Franco-American teenager, is a National Indie Excellence Award and American Fiction Award finalist. She is an avid hiker and a member of the AMC’s 4000-Footer Club who can often be found on a trail in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. When she’s not writing or hiking, she enjoys cross stitch embroidery, visiting new places, and binge-watching European crime dramas. See what she’s up to at emilienoelleprovost.com.
Photographer and writer Paul H. Richardson, born in Lowell, attended the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and University of Grenoble in France. He pursued photography at the Essex Photographic Workshop. His work can be seen at paulhrichardsonphotography.com. He is at work on a novel.
Dave Robinson these days lives in Portugal with his family. He is the author of Sweeney in Effable, a multi-book volume of adventures and imagination “about enjoying the view.” Poet Ilya Kaminsky praised his “brilliant narrative sparkling with images and memorable prose.”
J.D. Scrimgeour and the Ginling Collective have been translating contemporary Chinese poetry for the past four years. Scrimgeour is the author of two books of nonfiction and five books of poetry, the most recent being the bilingual book of poems, 香蕉面包 Banana Bread. The Ginling Collective is a group of Chinese students and American writers led by Scrimgeour. The two translations in this issue are the work of the 2022-23 edition of the group. J.D. teaches at Salem State University in Massachusetts.
Jeanne Schinto has been an independent writer since 1973. The author of three books, including Huddle Fever: Living in the Immigrant City, she has recently been elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society.
Chaz Scoggins was an award-winning sportswriter at the Lowell Sun for 44 years, covering the Boston Red Sox, Lowell Spinners, and UMass Lowell hockey and was national president of the Baseball Writers Association of America in 2000. Scoggins was also an essayist on UMass Lowell radio’s Sunrise drive-time program. He is an author with three books on baseball and several unpublished historical novels centered on the WWII Era that can be found along with a collection of essays on his website, scogginsbooksandblogs.com. He lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Tom Sexton of Alaska is the author of many collections of poetry including Cummiskey Alley: New Selected Lowell Poems and Li Bai Rides a Celestial Dolphin Home. He is a former Poet Laureate of Alaska and a member of the Lowell High School Hall of Fame.
Joshua Shapiro’s fiction has appeared in Notre Dame Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Literary Review, the Lowell-area anthology River Muse, and elsewhere. His short story “Smart Home” won the Mississippi Review 2022 Fiction Prize. His story “Signs” won third place in the Pangyrus 2023 Fiction Contest. A songwriter and a woodworker, he lives in Westford, MA, and is an alumnus of Harvard University and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
Born in Liverpool, England, Malcolm Sharps (1954-2024) studied sociology before entering the rare postage stamp trade in London. After disillusionment with business life in the capital, he lived mostly outside of Great Britain in France, Lithuania, Estonia, and Hungary. His short stories and articles are often based on places he has lived and interests in music, world literature, and social and cultural studies. He taught English as a foreign language for twenty-five years and translated Hungarian texts on classical music.
Je’Niyah Sneed is a freshman at Lowell High School and the winner of the 2023 Jack Kerouac Poetry Contest.
Tim Trask is the author of Frags, fiction from the Vietnam war, and West of Walden, a memoir of his four and a half years as a guard at MCI, Concord, as well as a few other scattered pieces here and there. He taught writing and literature at Stevens Institute of Technology, Eastern Nazarene College, Massasoit Community College, and Bridgewater State University.
Bill Tremblay was born in Southbridge, MA, and earned an MFA in Creative Writing at UMass Amherst. Recognized with awards from the National Endowment(s) for the Arts and the Humanities and the Fulbright Program, he was the John F. Stern Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University. He is back living in his home state. Recent books include The Luminous Racetrack and Walks Along the Ditch.
Cornelia Veenendaal, a former faculty member at UMass Boston, is a founder of Alice James Books. She lives in New Hampshire. Her poetry books include The Trans Siberian Railway and What Seas What Shores.
John Wooding, co-editor of The Lowell Review, is the author of a biography, The Power of Non-Violence: The Enduring Legacy of Richard Gregg.
Ma Yongbo was born in Yichun, Heilongjiang, China, in 1964. Since 1986 he has published over seventy original works and translations, including translations of poets such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and John Ashbery. He is a professor in the Faculty of Arts and Literature at Nanjing University of Science and Technology, and a leading scholar in Anglo-American postmodernist poetry. His studies center around Chinese and western modern poetics, postmodern literature, ecocriticism and western literary theory.
The Lowell Review brings together writers and readers in the Merrimack River watershed of eastern New England with people everywhere who share their curiosity about and passion for the small and large matters of life. Each issue includes essays, poems, stories, criticism, opinion, and visual art.
In the spirit of The Dial magazine of Massachusetts, edited by Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 1840s, The Lowell Review offers a space for creative and intellectual expression. The Dial sought to provide evidence of “what state of life and growth is now arrived and arriving.”
This publication springs from the RichardHowe.com blog, known for its “Voices from Lowell and beyond.” In America, the name Lowell stands out, associated with industrial innovation, working people, cultural pluralism, and some of the country’s literary greats.
