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In the 1950 movie “All About Eve” Lowell native Bette Davis famously quipped - “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.” And last night the “stars” of the RNC convention threw everything in the Rove and company bag of tricks at Barack Obama, Joe Biden, the media and just about any individual or entity that doesn’t march in lock-step with the current GOP spin. In spite of rocking Romney, ramming Rudy, awshucks Huckabee and loopy Lieberman, the star was, of course, the self-styled hockey mom who has done it all for God, Country, Family and the American Way. With wagging hand, pursed lips and raging sarcasm, Ms. Palin took herself off the “do not ask,” do not rebut, “do not challenge” list. She’s a candidate for Vice President and a heartbeat away from the Presidency and should be treated - oh maybe just like Hillary Clinton’s been treated! She’s not a vetted veteran or sister of the “traveling pantsuit brigade” and she isn’t Mother Teresa up for canonization. This 2008 campaign is serious business and nothing relevant should be off-the-table for Obama, Biden, McCain or Palin. Of course, rigorous fact-checking, comparison shopping, price checking and getting the best value for your family - you know the things that come natural to us “moms” - are de rigueur in the quest for selecting the best ticket for admission to the White House. Fasten your seatbelts - it’s going to be a bumpy 60 or so days to come. Stay tuned.

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It seems Barack Obama is stealing a page out of the Republican playbook. Obama has agreed to appear on FOX NEW’s  O’Reilly Factor hosted by conservative Bill O’Reilly. The interview will air tonight (Thursday) at 8:00PM. Of course, Obama hopes to take steam out of John McCain’s acceptance speech, which airs also airs tonight, at 9:00PM. Last night O’Reilly unabashedly admitted to his viewers that he knew he was being used by the Democratic Nominee to divert attention away from McCain. Apparently, negotiations have been ongoing for sometime for an Obama appearance…

Obama’s appearance will pique the curiosity of Republicans and Democrats alike as it comes on the heels of a story in Vanity Fair that discloses a meeting earlier this summer between Obama, and Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes to discuss, in part, the relationship between the Democratic nominee and the network often scorned by Democrats. Ailes told The Washington Post that he told Obama the network was determined to be fair but would not be “in the tank” for his campaign, and pressed Obama to appear on his network. (Wall Street Journal)

This is not the first time O’Reilly has been “used” by a Democrat. Last May Hillary Clinton also participated in a two part interview with O’Reilly in a failed attempt to stop Obama’s momentum. During the interview O’Reilly treated Clinton fairly. But now the stakes are higher for the conservative movement. It will be interesting to see if he does the same with Obama.

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Watching Joe Lieberman’s speech at the Republican Convention last night, I suddenly began thinking of Benedict Arnold.  While I’ll stop short of calling Lieberman a traitor, there are some parallels.  Both Lieberman and Arnold were from Connecticut.  Both felt slighted by the side to which they originally gave their loyalty and switched to the opposition.  There is one big difference: before he sold out his country, Arnold performed bravely and heroically and is seen by many historians to have been the best battlefield commander on the American side before his treachery.  Lieberman, on the other hand, acted cowardly in 2000 when he insisted on running for his Senate seat in Connecticut at the same time he was running nationwide as Al Gore’s vice presidential pick.  How about a vote of confidence for the ticket, Joe?  And then when the outcome of the election came down to a handful of votes in a Florida recount, did Lieberman urge Gore to fight on?  No, he counseled surrender.  And there he was again last night:  “Trust me, eloquence is no substitute for a record.”  “Trust me, the real ticket for change this year is the McCain-Palin ticket.”

Benedict Arnold was made a general in the British Army but he was shunned by the English and hated by the Americans for the rest of his life, never seeing his native Connecticut again.  Despite his infamy, Arnold was the inspiration for one of the most unique monuments in America – the Boot Monument at Saratoga National Battlefield Park.  While leading the American effort to capture Quebec in 1775, Arnold was wounded in the leg.  Two years later, while leading the decisive charge that won the battle of Saratoga, Arnold was wounded again in the same leg.  The inscription on the monument (shown below) reads “In memory of the ‘most brilliant soldier’ of the Continental Army, who was desperately wounded on this spot . . . 7^th October 1777, winning for his countrymen the Decisive Battle of the American Revolution and for himself the rank of Major General.”  Sometime after he went over to the British, it is said that Arnold was questioning a captured American officer.  Arnold asked his prisoner what the Americans would do to him (Arnold) if he was ever recaptured.  The officer replied: “They’d cut off the leg that was wounded at Quebec and Saratoga and bury it with full honors, then they’d hang the rest of you.”  Too bad Joe Lieberman never learned the lesson of the Boot Monument – no one ever likes a turncoat.  

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Last night at the Republican National Convention President George Bush addressed the delegates remotely from the White House. In a short 8+ minute speech Bush praised McCain as the leader the country needs to guide it through these dangerous times. Bush also used his speech to whack what he calls “the angry left”…

If the Hotel Hanoi couldn’t break John McCain’s resolve, you can be sure the anger left never will.

I wonder just who the president considers “the angry left”? Is it The press?… or is it people who disagree with him and are against the war?…or could it be people who think Big Oil is riding roughshod over the country racking up record profits?…or elected officials that favor universal health care?… Is it Ted Kennedy? or Barack Obama? Me? You? Who?… Who is “the angry left”?

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As I check out old SUN newspapers as part of my genealogy or general research I am always intrigued by a regular feature called The Old Timer. The unknown author (unknown to me at least) would write about people and events of 25 years ago and then  there would be a box with a few tidbits from 50 years ago. The informal style gives good information about Lowell and Lowellians and while not quite gossip it conveyed the flavor of both civic and political “lifestyle.” One of my favorite columns in the current SUN is the occasional “The Way We Were – 50/25/10 Years Ago” by Jim O’Loughlin – I assume he too has read The Old Timer.

The SUN of 70 years ago (“Lowell’s Greatest Newspaper” as the banner claimed) has had my attention of late so I thought I might highlight on this site - from time-to-time - some people or happenings in that year - 1938. The July 28, 1938 edition of the Lowell SUN offers these bits:

*Lowell City Councilor James A. Deignan announced that to promote Democratic harmony he would withdraw from the State Senate race in the 8th District. He duly informed Thomas McFadden, Chairman of the Democratic City Committee. (For full disclosure – Councilor Deignan was my grandfather.)

*Out-of-work employees of the shut down B&M car shop in Billerica protested the unnecessary delay in getting unemployment checks.

*The Bon Marche Bargain Basement end-of-the-month clearance sale featured silk hose at $.24 per pair, ladies dresses for $1.19 and some men’s suits for $9.95. Summer sales were popular - Pollard’s offered lace net curtains for $1.39 a pair and a 2-piece maple living room set for $69.50.

*600 people attended a bridge and whist party on the grounds of St. Jeanne D’Arc Parish to benefit a fund for repairs to the school.

*Thomas “Huck” Golden announced that the East End Club was holding its 44th weekly bingo night at the Rex auditorium under the supervision of John F. Carney and Son.

*100 members of the Bridge Street Merchants and Employees Association left Manning’s store yesterday - by private machines - for their annual outing to Blair’s Grove in Tyngsboro. A buffet luncheon and sports were enjoyed. 40 members of the Lowell Contractor’s Association went to Windham, NH for their outing led by Ralph Runels, Pearly Gilbert and “Red” Crane – joined by Alphonse Damboise, Alfred Petrie and Chet Runels among others. There was  a lot of talk about the new housing project planned for Lowell. (North Common Village  - I assume.)

*Lowell City Golf Champ  Tommy Burke of Longmeadow qualified for the New England Amateur tournament.

*Unorganized Democratic women of Lowell were told by Mrs. Sally Regan - president of the women’s division of Young Democrats – that they are recognized and affiliated with Young Democratic Clubs of America and not with any State Committee supervised organizations in Lowell or the vicinity. (Sounds as if there was a political turf war brewing.) Mrs. Regan and Mrs. Theresa McDermott - local member of the State Committee - attended a meeting on party harmony. (Some things never change!)

*Margaret (Mrs. Henry) Sullivan was the only woman among 70 aspiring candidates running for the Democratic nomination for representative in the 18th District. She felt there were too many “members of the bar” in the Legislature and that most members were only interested in building a “machine.”

*Some popular “dine and dance” spots advertising entertainment included the Coq D’or Inn, Nick’s Happy Hour in Tyngsboro, the Pines in Tewksbury and also The Blue Room of the American Hotel on Central Street in Lowell and Boots and Saddles in Groton.

*That night on the radio - folks could listen to crooners Rudee Vallee and Bing Crosby as well as the very popular Major Bowes Amateur Hour.

*Sampascoopies featured: Dan O’Dea and his brown suits, the eruditeness of Legalist Woodbury Howard, Jimmie Daley’s straw chapeau and these names – Claire Quigley (my colleague at Lowell High), Max Robinson, Tommy Dowd, Eleanor Carey, Charlie Gallagher (the druggist), Mary Patsourakos, George McGuane and Jimmie O’Donnell.

*”Accolades to City of Lowell for drop in traffic fatalities” – only 2 in 6 months was the early edition headline story along with a brakeman being “crushed to death on Western Avenue” in the 6 o’clock edition.

*Lowell Mayor Dewey Archambault thanked old Red Sox player Tris Speaker for “conducting school” for young baseball players at Shedd Park before crowd of 2000.

*Jack Cambria (Friendly Jack?) was selling 10 gallons of Silver Shell gasoline for $1.25.

*Well-known barber and prominent member of the Portuguese community Manuel P. Mello died - at 71 years, 9 months and 2 days - suddenly at his home during a half holiday from his business.

*There was a very interesting photo of a throng of women in Brockelman’s store in Kearney Square. The store was touting “daily specials in cooked meats” and urged women to “watch this newspaper and see how easily, economically and wisely they can plan summer meals.” (the 1938 version of take-out?)

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The lead editorial in the New York Times on Labor Day 1992 featured the Boott Cotton Mill Museum of Lowell, Massachusetts which had just opened that June.  The role of the museum in helping us understand the Industrial Revolution and our city’s place in it was aptly described by the Times which had this to say about Lowell:

Youngsters who are made to troop through America’s historic landmarks might reasonably conclude that in the past, rich was typical. Ordinary people are shown mainly as servants, or as slaves, in the sumptuous mansions and town houses that predominate in what are grandly called “heritage tours.”

Labor Day is a powerfully apt occasion to celebrate an exception: the Lowell National Historical Park, set in a gritty Massachusetts city. Here America’s working men and women have starring roles in the epic called “The Industrial Revolution.” A thundering score sets the mood, provided by 88 belt-driven looms in an unusual factory museum run by the National Park Service.

Lowell became America’s first factory town when Francis Cabot Lowell, a Boston merchant, spirited from England the secrets of the power loom. Two years later, in 1813, he and a mechanic fabricated an American prototype. Within a decade the first mill opened in Lowell, ingeniously using split-level canals to turn the turbines that powered the looms.  By 1848, when Lowell wove 50,000 miles of cotton cloth, it was also the laboratory for a “Golden Experiment” that elicited admiring comments from visitors like Charles Dickens. 

In their search for labor, mill owners hired young farm women, the “Lowell girls.” Ten companies employed 10,000 women who toiled 13 hours a day, their morals purified by curfews, compulsory religious service and watchful boarding-house matrons.  

But the sounds at their workplace, less uplifting, are recaptured in the Boott Cotton Mill Museum, just opened this June, where visitors truly need earplugs to enter the weave room. The noise is bone-jarring. One articulate mill worker, Lucy Larcom, found she could accustom herself to the noise, so it became like a silence. “I defied the machinery to make me its slave,” she wrote in 1889. “Its incessant discords could not drown the music of my thoughts if I would let them fly high enough.” These mills were not, like those in the old folk song, made out of marble nor the machines made out of gold. 

By this time, farm girls had been replaced by low-wage newcomers from Ireland, French Canada, the Baltics, Greece and Portugal. It is to the great credit of the Park Service that the harsh face of mill-town capitalism is not ignored. Taped interviews with retired workers evoke the horror of industrial injuries, the squalor of tenement life, the class bitterness that erupted in the great strike of 1912.

This is an American past that many grandparents lived, and still remember. Youngsters who experience even for a moment the gloom of these old mills will better understand why trade unions sprang into being to check rapacious capital. 

The Lowell park and museum realize an imaginative scheme put forward in the 1970’s by former Senator Paul Tsongas, a child of Lowell. Restoring the old canals and the long-shuttered mills has given new hope and dignity to a Lowell now entering the post-industrial revolution.

What better time than Labor Day to remember that the toil and pain of ordinary working men and women was the ultimate lubricant for all the machines. “It is the boast of Lowell that it has no aristocracy, either of wealth or talent, or of rank or position,” Charles Cowley, a local historian, wrote in 1856. “It is simply a city of mechanics, who have made the world ring with their achievement.” A proud boast, and warranted.

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If you are in Lowell this Labor Day and looking for something different to do, then take a walk through the Back Central neighborhood, where the yards and gardens are in full flower and production. Up and down the narrow, hilly streets between the Court House and the Concord River you will see an extraordinary display of Green Lowell. From car ports draped in grape vines to front yard Sacred Heart statues ringed in yellow and pink roses, from massive zucchini leaves pushing against chainlink fences and now depleted rows of corn, the neighborhood is bursting with flowers, fruits, and vegetables. Sunflowers the size of hubcaps and yellow-orange peaches shining in small trees will surprise you around each corner. At Jollene Dubner Park along the Concord River, the flower stalks are three feet tall. The pergola is completely covered with wisteria. Take a seat and watch the river ride by. Pick any lane and peer into a postage-stamp sized yard, through the chicken-wire and screening, and you’ll probably find a platoon of tomato plants surrounded by cucumbers, circled by black-eyed Susans. And more sunflowers. Some homeowners specialize in zinnias, the industrial brand with dense red flowers that keep their shape for months. One house will have a single flower grown in an old white plastic dry-wall bucket while another place will have a tidy victory garden with beans, zukes, and cukes, and still another will look like a miniature farm with ten or twenty different veggies and fruits ready for harvest. The connecting motif is grapevines, of course, which you see from Cady to Crosby streets and in between. The Enterprise Bank branch in the neighborhood has the prominent Flowering City sign and logo, sending a message about Lowell in general and particularly appropriate at the start of September on the surrounding streets.

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I had several stops to make downtown yesterday, and at each place people were talking about the sudden loss of Andy St. Onge. Within the cultural network and among downtown business folks, I had a sense of Lowell being a village–a village that had lost one of its own. Andy was part of the Lowell public team, those people who strive day to day to present the city in the best light and help present the public life of the community for the benefit of residents and visitors alike. Everyone was saying, I just talked to him yesterday or the day before that. He had picked up the phone a few days ago when I called the Cultural Affairs and Special Events Office at City Hall looking for LZ Nunn. Andy was a believer in Lowell’s potential. We will miss him. His family, friends and colleagues will remember his contribution to the ongoing effort to make Lowell everything it can be. 

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Writing in the Boston Globe Magazine on October 8, 2000, Neil Miller made this observation: “Increasingly, and with characteristic lack of fanfare, the Merrimack Valley is gaining literary visibility. And its writers are garnering various honors as well. [Andre] Dubus III’s novel House of Sand and Fog was a 1999 nominee for the National Book Award. [Jane]Brox’s Five Thousand Days Like This One was a 1999 National Book Critics Circle finalist in nonfiction. Andover novelist Mary McGarry Morris’s Songs in Ordinary Time was the June 1997 Oprah Book Club selection.” Fast-forward to today and pick up a copy of the Sept-Oct issue of Poets and Writers Magazine, the main publication for creative writers in the country, with a circulation of 80,000. Readers will find a full-page ad with the headline “A River of Writers: October is Literary Month in the Greater Merrimack Valley.” The page includes information about four major literary events coming in October. The annual Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! festival (Oct 2-5), the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in Lowell (Oct 10-12), the Concord Festival of Authors in Concord and Lowell (Oct 15 - Nov 2), and the Robert Frost Festival in Lawrence (Oct 25). The ad appears thanks to the Greater Merrimack Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau, especially executive director Deb Belanger. This is a big step in identifying our region as a literary hot spot in New England and the nation. There is much to be gained in promoting the literary heritage (Bradstreet, Whittier, Larcom, Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, Hawthorne, Frost, Kerouac, Dubus II, and more) and presenting today’s literary talent in this time when more and more people are realizing that creative assets are natural resources. A river of writers, then and now.

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This is a video of George W Bush’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 2004. It is pretty long, but take a look at the first minute or so. Check out the backdrop behind Bush…It is made up of large Grecian Columns. And the stage is round protruding away from the president’s entrance area…sound familiar? After listening to the far right describe the Obamaopolis for the past week, I am sure this does sound familar. To quote Shakspeare…”The eye sees not itself, but by reflection”.

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