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8 Surprising Facts About Martin Luther King Jr. in New England

Martin Luther King Jr. spent plenty of time in New England, and not just giving speeches about civil rights. He worked in Connecticut over the summers as a teenager, and he earned his Ph.D. and courted his wife in Boston.

Here are eight facts you may not know about Martin Luther King’s impact on the region and its people.

1. A phone call to his wife helped elect JFK.

On Oct. 26, 1960, Sen. John F. Kennedy wanted to win his close race for president against Vice President Richard Nixon.

Martin Luther King, Jr., wanted to get out of a Georgia prison for protesting a segregated restaurant.

Kennedy called Georgia’s governor and asked him to try to free King. He also called Coretta Scott King to show his sympathy. The governor got Martin Luther King released, and word of Kennedy’s phone calls spread throughout the black community.

Many attributed Kennedy’s victory to those telephone calls.

Ironically, Martin Luther King had a better relationship with Richard Nixon than he did with Kennedy.

2. Boston was the 2nd home of Martin Luther King Jr.

He called Boston his “second home,” because he had lived in the South End as a graduate student at Boston University. He also courted Coretta Scott while she attended the New England Conservatory of Music.

Martin Luther King met his wife in Boston

3. He spent summers in Connecticut.

As a teenager, Martin Luther King Jr, spent two summers working in Simsbury, Conn.

In 1944, he worked in the tobacco fields to earn money for his tuition at Morehouse College. The school had an arrangement with Cullman Bros., which hired Morehouse students to work through harvest.

Young King (who then went by his birth name, Michael) found the experience liberating. He could worship with white people in church, eat in the same restaurants and sit in the same train car.

He returned three years later for another summer.

King with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon Johnson and civil rights leaders, June 22, 1963.

4. He spoke at many New England colleges.

As a civil rights leader, Martin Luther King spoke at many New England colleges, including Bowdoin College, Francis College (now University of New England), Brown, Boston University, Harvard, Yale and the University of Rhode Island.

In 1964, Springfield College gave him an honorary degree. The FBI pressured the college’s president, Glenn A. Olds, to cancel the invitation to speak at the commencement. Olds held his ground even though it cost the college a potential $1 million contribution.

5. A gift to his widow disqualified a New Hampshire racehorse.

The New Hampshire thoroughbred Dancer’s Image won, then lost, the Kentucky Derby in 1968 because his owner supported the civil rights movement. Peter Fuller, who owned Dancer’s Image, said resentful white Southerners stripped him of his prize.

The horse had won the Derby on May 4, 1968, a month after King’s assassination in Memphis. Two days after King died, Fuller gave $62,000 won by Dancer’s Image to his widow.

Three days after Dancer’s Image won the Kentucky Derby, Fuller had to return his purse. The racetrack claimed the horse tested positive for a banned substance. Fuller maintained to his death they’d framed him because of his gift to Coretta Scott King.

Martin Luther King and his family arrive in Montgomery from Selma, March 1965

6. The KKK murdered a Boston minister after Selma.

A Boston Unitarian-Universalist minister, James Reeb, joined King’s second march in Selma, Ala., in 1965. The Ku Klux Klan beat him savagely that night, and he died two days later.

King held a news conference to denounce the “cowardly” attack.

Tens of thousands held vigils, and President Lyndon Johnson invoked his memory four days later when he sent the Voting Rights Act to Congress.

King during a 1964 news conference.

7. Martin Luther King Jr. found Jackie “something.”

King came to the White House to discuss civil rights with President John F. Kennedy.

The special assistant for civil Rights, Harris Wofford, escorted King to the family quarters, where Kennedy had asked to meet him. They entered a small elevator, but it went down instead of up.

When the elevator doors opened in the basement, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy – in blue jeans — got on. Wofford introduced them, and she said, “Oh, Dr. King, you would be so thrilled if you could just have been with me in the basement this morning. I found a chair right out of the Andrew Jackson period–a beautiful chair.”

King’s comment after she left: “Well, well—wasn’t that something.”

8. James Brown saved the day in Boston.

James Brown appeared in Boston just after King was assassinated.

After King’s murder, riots broke out in more than 100 U.S. cities. Boston remained relatively peaceful because of the legendary James Brown concert at Boston Garden the next day.

Boston Mayor Kevin White prevailed on Brown to let WGBH rebroadcast his performance. Throughout the show, between songs, the singer talked about Martin Luther King and urged the people to stay calm.

WGBH rebroadcast the show, over and over, and thousands of angry young people stayed home. The next day the local news media gave James Brown credit for keeping the peace.

This story about Martin Luther King Jr. was updated in 2023.

Image: King at a press conference By Marion S. Trikosko – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs divisionunder the digital ID ppmsc.01269.This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing for more information., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17218777.

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The Other Boston Tea Party, The Hippest Club in Town

Boston and Cambridge were centers of the Sixties counterculture, and from 1967-70 the other Boston Tea Party was the epicenter of the center.

It was a run-down 19^th-century house of worship in Boston’s South End that had been showing underground films in the 1960s. In 1967, a Kansas City lawyer and a hippie MIT graduate scraped together a few thousand dollars to stage rock concerts on weekends.

The Boston Tea Party in 2019. Photo courtesy Google maps.

For $3 or $3.50, you could see acts like the Grateful Dead, The Byrds, Neil Young, Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, Cream, Fleetwood Mac, The Allman Brothers Band, Joe Cocker, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Santana, Taj Mahal, Ten Years After and Sly and the Family Stone. The Who commanded a premium of $4.50 for their Tommy concert. Unknowns Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood, later of the Rolling Stones, played as part of Jeff Beck.

Jonathan Richman played there with his proto-punk band, the Modern Lovers. He remembers how fun the crowd was:

Wall-to-wall hippies, bikers, Harvard students, Northeastern students, fashion models, professors, drug dealers, art teachers, groupies, MIT students, photographers, local thugs, local disc jockeys, skinny-bohemian-artist girls, visiting dignitaries from the New York art scene, and the royalty of the Boston music set — the local singers and guitar-players in their mod suits strolling around with their beautiful girlfriends.

Kansas City Lawyer

People called the other Boston Tea Party ‘a psychedelic ballroom,’ ‘a cathedral of the hippie era,’ ‘the hippest club in Boston’ and ‘everybody’s cup of tea.’

It opened on Jan. 20, 1967, with a capacity of 400. Local record stores and designated shoe stores sold tickets. A Boston group, The Lost, played the first concert. Other local bands included The Hallucinations, The Beacon Street Union, The Bagatelle, Ill Wind and The Cloud. A sign behind the stage said ‘Praise Ye The Lord,’ and psychedelic light shows accompanied the concerts.

Ray Riepen was The Boston Tea Party’s unlikely owner. A chain-smoking lawyer from Kansas City, he had moved to Cambridge to earn a master’s degree at Harvard School of Law. Riepen kept his hair short, wore three-piece suits and drove a Mercedes.

He got involved with The Boston Tea Party when the manager of the underground film series wanted to stage rock ‘n roll dance parties on weekends. Riepen and the hippie MIT graduate, David Hahn, put together $3,000 and organized the concerts. Riepen later bought out Hahn.

Soon after The Boston Tea Party opened, Riepen approached the management of a struggling classical music FM station and persuaded them to let him run it as an underground rock station. He assembled a group of hippie DJs who promoted The Boston Tea Party concerts.

Alternative Media

He hired as one of his DJs a singer named Peter Wolf, who also fronted The Hallucination and later The J. Geils Band.

Alternative newspapers such as Boston After Dark and the Avatar also promoted the concerts.

The concert hall’s manager, Steve Nelson, used to walk into the offices of Boston After Dark, take over a workspace, open a briefcase full of graphic layout tools and make up ads on the spot. His successor, Bob Driscoll, later created a Boston Tea Party look, spare with plenty of white space. Those posters are now highly collectible. (To see Boston Tea Party posters in chronological order, click here.)

The Velvets

By the spring of 1967, The Boston Tea Party booked bands from out of town. Jon Landau, then a music critic and later Bruce Springsteen’s manager, called the Tea Party ‘consistently well-run.’ He said out-of-town groups liked it because of the professional treatment they received.

On May 26, 1967, the Velvet Underground played The Boston Tea Party, the first of many times. The band was one of the most influential in rock history. Andy Warhol managed them as the house band for his Factory, but for several years they used The Boston Tea Party as their home base. In late 1968, Lou Reed said onstage, “This is our favorite place to play in the whole country.”

That first concert launched the Velvets career as a touring band. The German singer Nico showed up late for it, toward the end of the show, and Reed wouldn’t let her on stage.

A photograph of the Velvet Underground on the back cover of the White Light/White Heat album shows them under The Boston Tea Party marquee and the letters ‘ARTY.’ (To hear the Jan. 10, 1969 Velvet Underground show, click here.)

Drugs and Rock ‘N Roll

Led Zeppelin played The Boston Tea Party on their first US tour in January 1969. “They only had an hour’s worth of material, but the crowd wouldn’t let them stop, so they just kept jamming,” said Nelson. Critics considered that gig key to the transformation of the band’s performance style to long sets with extended solos.

Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler saw a Led Zeppelin show at The Boston Tea Party in 1969. He called it one of two concerts in which he ‘just sat with my mouth open.’ (To hear a Led Zeppelin concert at The Boston Tea Party, click here.)

In July ‘69 the club relocated to 15 Landsdowne Street, a space that held 1900 people. The Grateful Dead played there on New Year’s Eve 1969, but not before trying to get everyone high on LSD. They spiked the drinks in the soda machine and injected it into a sealed bottle of Mateus. The Dead managed to victimize manager Don Law and the security guards.

Soda Pop Raid

Boston politicians and law enforcement officers did not love the racially mixed crowd of longhaired rock ‘n roll fans. One night while The Cloud was playing, the house lights went on and dozens of Boston police officers swarmed into the hall looking for drugs. They were led by Boston Licensing Commissioner Albert P. ‘Dapper’ O’Neil, who brought with him a Boston Herald-Traveler reporter hoping for a story.

The police didn’t find any drugs, but arrested the management for an expired license to sell soft drinks. Ray Repien appeared in court and put on a country lawyer routine for the judge. Manager Steve Nelson remembers him saying, “No your honor, we don’t approve of drugs, shucks, all we’re doing at the Tea Party is giving the kids something to do.”

The Herald-Traveler’s headline was not what Dapper O’Neil hoped for: “Soda Pop Raid Fizzles.”

Wild Times

Stage manager Stanley Kastner had to hold the piano so it wouldn’t collapse while Little Richard danced on it. While the audience gave him a 45-minute ovation, Kastner said Little Richard went backstage to get paid in cash. He took a gun out of a metal briefcase, counted the bills and left while the audience was still applauding.

B.B. King played to his first white audience in Boston there. So did Muddy Waters.

It’s a well-known story that James Brown calmed Boston after Martin Luther King’s assassination by letting WGBH-TV carry his Boston Garden performance live. Less well-known is the blues concert Muddy Waters gave at The Boston Tea Party the night King was killed. “Muddy sang the bluest blues I’ve ever heard, more of a wake really than a concert,“ remembered Nelson.

Historic Marker

The Boston Tea Party closed for good in December 1970, a victim of the rock ‘n roll popularity it helped to create. Bands were commanding more money for larger venues.

The 40^th anniversary of the other Boston Tea Party was celebrated on Jan. 24, 2007, with a gathering of 100 Boston music people. The Bostonian Society unveiled a small marker next to the 7-Eleven that occupies the ground floor. The rest of the building is now condominiums.

The Velvet Underground pictured in front of The Boston Tea Party

Nelson recalled how The Boston Tea Party acolytes managed to persuade the staid historical society to agree to the marker.

The building, built in 1872, once functioned as a Unitarian church. For some never-explained reason one of the windows was shaped like a Star of David. The meeting house was built on land donated by a rich Bostonian, John Gardner, whose son married Isabelle Stewart. It was dedicated to the memory of Theodore Parker, the Unitarian minister, abolitionist and early supporter of women’s rights.

Said Nelson,

…the kind of people who hung out at the Tea Party in the Sixties were for civil rights and women’s rights and against the Vietnam War, so Theodore Parker’s spirit was very much alive at the Tea Party. What karma!

With thanks to the Music Museum of New England and Berkshire Fine Arts. This story about the other Boston Tea Party was updated in 2023.

Images: Boston Tea Party building courtesy Google Maps, image capture 2019. Mick Fleetwood By W.W.Thaler – H. Weber, Hildesheim – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13409500.

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Beatles Roll Through Boston – With Pandemonium to Spare

In 1964, New England – along with the rest of the country — went Beatles crazy. Since the day they appeared on the Ed Sullivan show in February, with their scandalously long hair, the boys from Liverpool did nothing but wow crowds across the U.S. on their first American tour.

The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show.

On Sept. 12, 1964, Boston took its turn. All summer, the Beatles had made their presence known in New England parents. Images of girls shrieking and fainting at their concerts disturbed parents and inflamed teenagers.

Doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital tried to explain the frenzy as a sort of natural reaction fueled by parental disapproval.

Beatles Meet the Pops

Boston Pops conductor Arthur Fiedler put a smile on concert-goers’ faces by adding a rendition of I Want to Hold Your Hand to the summer concert. Orchestra members did not find it amusing.

Fiedler had traveled to Liverpool earlier and found the band’s appeal fascinating. The band members joked a bit about it, but one loyal Beatles fan would later say the Pops turned her on to the group. “I thought if the Pops did it, the Beatles couldn’t be that bad.”

Girls with their Beatles tickets. (Boston Public Library)

When the Beatles finally arrived in Boston, they tried to stay low-key. Their plane arrived at 3:40 a.m. at Hanscom Field Air Force Base under tight security. Only a small crowd greeted them.

They stayed at the Madison Hotel, on an upper floor of the building located next to Boston Garden. People of a certain age knew well the Madison Hotel sign. Any effort to keep a low profile failed, however, and hundreds of fans stampeded the hotel to get at the quartet.

North Station area in early 1960s, Hotel Madison (with Boston Garden immediately behind it) at upper right

The (Short) Main Event

A quick press conference – crashed by three fans – let the band giggle with the media over their success and teed up the main event that evening.

By the start of the show, 13,909 fans officially packed the Boston Garden. Each had a ticket tickets priced at $3.50 to $5.50. Girls screamed and fainted. Causeway Street was flooded with thousands who couldn’t get in but wanted to witness the event anyway.

The band took the stage at 9:15, and sang a dozen songs that went virtually unheard because of the screaming fans. They began with Twist and Shout and included two recent hits: She Loves You and I Want To Hold Your Hand. They ended with Long Tall Sally, making history with a 35-minute show. The British had conquered Boston again.

The boys boarded a flight to Baltimore before midnight as thousands of fans lingered outside Boston Garden hoping for one last glimpse.

This story was updated in 2022. Images: Beatles with Ed Sullivan By CBS Television – eBayfrontbackarchived copy of auction and photos, PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46675073. Hotel Mdison and Boston Garden By Urban Redevelopment Division, Boston Housing Authority – West End project area looking northeasterly via City of Boston ArchivesBoston Housing Authority photographs in Boston Redevelopment Authority photographsCollection # 4010.001, File name: WE_0021, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45247573.

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Flashback Photo: Bob Cousy

Bob Cousy was the basketball player everyone wanted to be in the 1950s – sure-handed, swift and good at running the game. He had an uncanny way of anticipating how a play would unfold and dishing off the ball to the right guy at the right time. With no-look and behind the back passes, he was undeniably flashy, but he got results. He got the best out of everyone on his team – the Boston Celtics, but it almost wasn’t to be.

Bob Cousy. Photo courtesy NBA Library.

There is no shortage of great Bob Cousy stories, but one of the best is how the man known to generations of fans first for his on-court leadership, and later as a broadcaster, nearly made his NBA home with the Tri-Cities Blackhawks.

Legendary coach Red Auerbach passed over the local favorite from Holy Cross in the 1950 draft. He famously said he needed a big man, not a “local yokel.”

But Red’s luck was working that year, even if he and Celtics owner Walter Brown didn’t realize it.

The Bob Cousy Deal

Cousy balked at signing with a team in the Midwest. He had plans to start a driving school in Worcester, and he didn’t want to move. Meanwhile, the Chicago Stags were in the process of folding. A struggle went on to see who would pick up their best players.

Max Zaslofsky, the Stags’ guard/forward, was the real prize. In the horse-trading that went on, the owner of the Blackhawks agreed to give up the rights to Cousy in exchange for getting Stags’ guard Frankie Brian.

But what should happen to Cousy? The commissioner put three names in a hat: Zaslofsky, Stags’ point guard Andy Phillip and the now teamless Cousy.

The Knicks pulled Zaslofsky, the Philadelphia Warriors snagged Phillip and the Celtics got Cousy. Initially, Walter Brown was disappointed – having missed out on two proven veterans. But eventually he and Auerbach would change their tune.

Cousy’s six NBA championships and 13 all-star appearances made him by far the best of the three available players. Today, the award for the best college point guard is the Bob Cousy Award.

But with all his accolades, perhaps the best that can be said about Cousy is he is a good guy. For decades it was not uncommon to bump into Cousy in the bowels of the old Boston Garden preparing for his broadcast job. Any and all could expect a friendly hello from one of the best ever to play.

This story was updated in 2021.

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‘Havlicek Stole the Ball!’: The Greatest Broadcast Moment Ever in Basketball

To the New England sports fan, the phrase ‘Havlicek stole the ball!’ is as profound and as personal as ‘Ask not what your country can do for you’ is to Irish Democrats.

Johnny Most high above courtside.

‘Havlicek stole the ball!’ was the most famous radio call in basketball history. The lore about it is as much about the colorful radio announcer Johnny Most as it is about the Boston Celtics’ all-time high scorer, John Havlicek.

Most was the radio voice of the Celtics during the team’s golden era, from 1953 to 1990. Many fans would watch the game on television with the sound turned down and Johnny Most turned up.

High Above Courtside

Johnny Most was born on June 15, 1923 in New York City and named after his grandfather, Johann Most, an anarchist newspaper editor. After Most served with distinction as an aerial gunner in World War II, he went into broadcasting.

He established himself high above courtside in the old Boston Garden, back in the day when fans could run into players on the way to their seats. He called games in a voice that sounded like a cheese grater. His explanation: he gargled with Saniflush.

Newspaper reporters who sat beneath Most had to dodge his long cigarette ashes that fluttered down through the floorboards. He once dropped a cigarette into his lap and set his pants on fire while on the air.

Havlicek Stole The Ball

He was a notorious homer who — according to one referee — could cause a riot at High Mass. To Most, the game was a morality play in which his beloved Celtics were the good guys and the opposing players were thugs and cheats.

He didn’t like Lakers star Wilt Chamberlain one little bit. In 1969, the Lakers were favored to win the NBA championship. When the Celtics arrived at the Lakers’ Forum for the final game, they found thousands of victory balloons tied to the ceiling, the USC Trojan Marching band on the sidelines and cases of champagne stacked outside the Lakers’ locker room. During the game, Chamberlain famously left the court with a knee injury, but wanted back in when his replacement started producing. The Celtics won that game, and the championship. Most was not gracious:

We busted their balloons! The USC Band is packing their instruments and all the champagne has suddenly gone flat. And then there’s poor Wilt, who probably is icing his boo-boo right now while picking up a crying towel.

Johnny Most was also a poet who published a volume of poetry called Feelings: Private Thoughts and Poems.

‘Havlicek Stole the Ball’

John Havlicek

It was on April 15, 1965 that Havlicek stole the ball, during the closing seconds of Game 7 against the Philadelphia 76ers in the 1965 Eastern Conference Finals. The Celtics’ lead had melted away to one point. Philadelphia had the ball out of bounds and a good chance to win. Philadelphia guard Hal Greer tossed the ball to Chet Walker, but Havlicek tipped the ball to Celtic Sam Jones in one of the greatest NBA plays ever.

From his perch high above courtside, Most screamed over the WHDH airwaves:

Greer is putting the ball in play. He gets it out deep and Havlicek steals it! Over to Sam Jones! Havlicek stole the ball! It’s all over. It’s all over! Johnny Havlicek is being mobbed by the fans!

The Celtics won, 110-109, and delirious fans carried Havlicek off the court. The Celtics went on to win their seventh consecutive championship.

Johnny Most, Bernard Cardinal Law and Mayor Ray Flynn celebrating the Celtics’ championship at City Hall in 1984.

Later in his career Most was notorious for nicknaming opposing players. Magic Johnson was ‘Crybaby,’ Isiah Thomas was ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy’ and Washington Bullets players Rick Mahorn and Jeff Ruland were interchangeably ‘McFilthy’ and ‘McNasty.’ Most especially hated Detroit Pistons player Bill Laimbeer, a ‘dirty rotten player’ he nicknamed ‘Big Baby.’ (Watch Most trash the opposing teams here.)

He retired in 1990 due to failing health. Johnny Most died on Jan. 4, 1993, in Hyannis, Mass. John Havlicek died on April 25, 2019, having suffered from Parkinson’s disease.

This story was updated in 2023. Photo of Most in 1984 courtesy By City of Boston Archives from West Roxbury, United States CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65419210

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How the Lowell Mill Girls Led to Masterpiece Theatre

In January 1971, WGBH-TV presented the first Masterpiece Theatre, made possible by a grant in 1836 from John Lowell, Jr.

Really.

John Lowell, Jr., on his travels

John Lowell, Jr., was the son of Francis Cabot Lowell and Hannah Jackson.

Lowell’s father founded Lowell, Mass., and his mother was the sister of Patrick Tracy Jackson, Lowell’s business partner. These early mill owners created educational and cultural institutions for the mill girls they employed: libraries, concerts and lectures.

High-Class Adventure

Lowell was born on May 11, 1799 and named after his grandfather, a federal judge appointed by George Washington and John Adams. Young Lowell led a life of high-class adventure that could have made a terrific Masterpiece Theatre series.

He attended Edinburgh High School in Scotland, entered Harvard at 14 and dropped out. He then sailed before the mast to India, where he followed Marco Polo’s route. Lowell then returned to America and pursued politics and the family business.

Within a few months in 1830 and 1831 his wife and two young daughters died of scarlet fever. Bereft, Lowell quit business and traveled west to assuage his grief. Still he grieved. So he sailed to Europe, where he commissioned artist Charles Gabriel Gleyre to record his journey to Italy, Greece, Turkey, Armenia, Persia and Egypt.

Lowell fell ill on a camel trip through Egypt. He knew his condition was serious, so he sat at the palace of Luxor and revised his will. He then pushed on to Bombay, where he died on March 4, 1836, all of 36 years old.

Lowell Mill Girls

That will written on the banks of the Nile included a bequest of $250,000 for popular lectures by eminent scientists and intellectuals. It was an enormous and unusual charitable donation for the time. The money paid for the Lowell Institute, which would eventually foster the Lowell Institute School at Northeastern University. It also fostered the Harvard Extension School, the Boston Public Library Lowell Lecture Series, the Kennedy Library Forums, the New England Aquarium Lecture Series and WGBH-FM andWGBH-TV.

Lowell Lecturers

The Lowell Institute offered two kinds of lectures: popular courses and more advanced lectures. As many as 10,000 people tried to get into the popular courses.

The first season of lectures was delivered by Benjamin Silliman, the Yale College professor of geology who first studied a meteorite in America. That led to a second season of talks on chemistry. The chemistry talks proved so popular that the crowd crushed in the windows of the Old Corner Bookstore, which sold tickets.

Old Corner Bookstore, 1903

Over time, the Lowell Lecturers would include the most famous figures in science, literature, philosophy and politics. Naturalist Louis Agassiz, novelist Charles Dickens and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted all gave Lowell Lectures.

John Lowell, Jr.
(Yup, same guy)

One reason for their success was the size of John Lowell, Jr.’s bequest. “It is so substantially endowed as to be able at all times to command any man it may name as a lecturer, and to remunerate him generously for the careful preparation which it always demands,” wrote Mrs. Harriette Knight Smith in her The History of the Lowell Institute.

Another reason: They were free and open to everyone regardless of gender, race or class. Lowell left specific instructions to that effect. He also ordered the trust be administered by a single person, preferably a Lowell. That person would appoint his own successor. Lowell’s cousin John Amory Lowell first got the job. Today, William A. Lowell is the sole trustee.

A Bright New Hope

In the middle of the 20^th century the Lowell Institute got into broadcasting by forming the Lowell Institute Cooperative Broadcast Council. The council created the WGBH (89.7 FM) radio station, which went on the air on October 6, 1951. It featured a live broadcast of — what else? — the Boston Symphony Orchestra. During the intermission, composer Aaron Copeland called the radio station a “bright new hope.”

WGBH-TV first aired on May 2, 1955, with a children’s program called Come and See, from Tufts’ Nursery Training School. For the next decade and a half, WGBH-TV would broaden its programming to include a broadcast of James Brown’s performance at Boston Garden. It also broadcast Evening at Pops, Eleanor Roosevelt’s Prospects of Mankind and This Old House.

On Jan. 10, 1971, Masterpiece Theatre made its debut on WGBH-TV with Alistair Cook in the armchair. The First Churchills dramatized the lives of John and Sarah Churchill, from their first meeting at the court of King Charles II. Sarah Hampshire took the part and won an Emmy for it.

The First Churchills set the pattern for many more Masterpiece Theatre, then Masterpiece, productions. I, Claudius; The Forsyte Saga; Upstairs, Downstairs; The Jewel in the Crown; and Downton Abbey. It is America’s longest-running weekly prime-time drama series, and now has two spinoffs: Masterpiece Mystery! and Masterpiece Contemporary.

Upcoming events sponsored by the Lowell Institute can be found here.

This story updated in 2022.

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