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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 French Chef Comes on With a Bang in 1963

Julia Child was neither French nor a chef, but The French Chef made her a national icon and helped launch the Public Broadcasting System.

The French Chef

When The French Chef first aired on Feb. 11, 1963, Julia Child, 50, had written a cookbook had had almost no television experience. The previous summer she had cooked an omelet on a hotplate for a WGBH-TV program called People Are Reading.

That appearance went so well that WGBH producers decided to air a pilot program. Julia cooked an omelet and, on the next show, soufflés. At the end of the second show she sat down and ate her soufflé with a slug of white wine – something that hadn’t been done before on American live television.

Her fondness for wine would become one of the many leitmotifs of Julia Child’s cooking shows, which for 62 years taught Americans to make mousses, quiches and crepes.

“Drama is very important in life,” she once said. “You have to come on with a bang.”

Plymouth Roots

Julia Child was the daughter of a wealthy Pasadena banker. She was educated at Smith College and served in the Office of Special Services during World War II. She met Paul Child in Ceylon, they married and lived in Europe, where Julia finally learned to cook at the age of 32. While living in Paris, she began writing her blockbuster cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Julia and Paul moved to Cambridge, Mass., in 1961. Despite her California upbringing, Julia had deep roots in Massachusetts. Her maternal grandmother was a direct descendant of William Bradford. Her maternal grandfather, Byron Weston, also had roots in Plymouth Colony, served as lieutenant governor of Massachusetts . He started the Weston Paper Company, which rivaled the Crane Paper Company.

Paul and Julia Child watched that first pilot program on their black-and-white television in Cambridge, where their neighbors included Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and John Kenneth Galbraith.

Julia was horrified. She said she looked like Mrs. Steam Engine, careening across the screen, panting heavily. “There I was in black and white, a large woman sloshing eggs too quickly here, too slowly there, she said”

But she was real, she was easygoing and she didn’t talk down to her audience. She was also a character at 6’2” with a warbly voice and a wicked sense of humor. WGBH decided knew they had a hit.

The French Chef Premiers With a Shock

Julia Child

They produced the show in a demonstration kitchen at the Cambridge Electric Light Company. The stove, unfortunately, was electric. Every time Julia touched it, the stove gave her a mild shock. If she perspired heavily, the shock was not so mild. Careful viewers could see her twitch when a shock caught her by surprise.

Feb. 11, 1963, was the night of the Beanpot game between Harvard and Boston College. Fortunately for Julia, it didn’t start until 9 p.m. The French Chef debuted at 8 p.m.

Julia made beef bourguignon, ‘a perfectly delicious dish,’ she called it. She had written the script, bought the ingredients and brought kitchen equipment and props such as tablecloths, dishes, candlesticks and wine glasses. Volunteers were recruited to wash dishes.

Paul diagrammed the entire kitchen, down to the bottles on the shelves. When Julia had to reach for the olive oil, she could just glance at his notes that said, ‘shelf #1, left-hand side, glass bottle.’

Mishaps

The show went without a hitch. The second one, not so much. She was busily chatting with her audience through the camera when the onion soup burned. She didn’t acknowledge the mistake. “That’s a wonderful smell,” she said, as she inhaled the smoking mess.

Many mishaps followed. She burned the butter, dropped the food, spilled the sauce and wiped her fingers on her apron. An urban myth spread that she had once dropped a chicken on the floor, picked it up and dusted it off.

It never happened, though she once dropped a potato pancake onto the stove. “Oh, that didn’t go very well,” she said. “But you can always pick it up. If you are alone in the kitchen, who is going to see?”

She used kitchen utensils for comic effect, once throwing a rolling pin over her shoulder because she didn’t like it. She staunchly defended cream and butter, dismissing margarine as ‘that other spread.’ She scoffed at dieting, saying it was what you did while waiting for the steak to cook.

On an episode about cooking chicken, she introduced a row of raw poultry as the chicken sisters, slapping them as she called them by name: Miss Broiler, Miss Fryer, Miss Roaster, Miss Capon, Miss Stewer and old Madame Hen!’

Love At First Sight

The Julia Child kitchen

The public loved her. One viewer wrote to the station, “Loved watching her catch the frying pan as it almost went off the counter.”

“Loved her looking for the cover of the casserole,” wrote another. They also sent contributions, mentioning Julia Child. Perhaps what got her the show was her moneyed Cambridge neighbors, who served her dishes at parties and talked about how funny and entertaining she was.

Her timing was good, too. French cooking had been considered expensive restaurant fare. But America had entered a new phase of prosperity and American cooks were ready to leave behind molded Jell-O salads and tuna casseroles. The immensely popular First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, had hired a real French chef, Rene Verdon, to cook for the White House.

The French Chef made Julia Child famous. “Celebrity has its uses,” she said. “I can always get a seat in any restaurant.”

The French Chef Syndicated

WGBH was a shoestring operation at the time, a station that evolved from the 19^th-century Lowell Lecture Series. Sometimes The French Chef had to cover expenses by auctioning off the dishes to the audience at the end of the show.

But The French Chef was so popular it quickly syndicated to 20 other educational stations across the country at a time when all educational programming was local.

It became the backbone of the fledgling educational television network we now know as PBS.

In 1964, The French Chef received a Peabody Award. Julia was credited with doing “more than show us how good cooking is achieved; by her delightful demonstrations she has brought the pleasures of good living into many American homes.” On Nov. 25, 1966, Julia Child appeared on the cover of Time magazine as “Our Lady of the Ladle.”

Today, Julia Child’s kitchen, used to stage subsequent cooking programs, can be visited at the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

PBS has a website devoted to her, which includes her advice:

This is my invariable advice to people: Learn how to cook — try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless, and above all have fun.

With thanks to Dearie, The Remarkable Life of Julia Child by Bob Spitz.

Photos: The Julia Child Kitchen,’ by Matthew Bisanz. ” Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0–2.5–2.0–1.0 via Wikimedia Commons. ‘Julia Child at KUHT,’ by KUHT. Licensed under Creative Commons Zero, Public Domain Dedication via Wikimedia Commons. Julia Child Kitchen frontal view By ‘Matthew G. Bisanz, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7977521.

This story about The French Chef was updated in 2022.

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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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Julia Child Falls in Love in Ceylon

Julia Child would never have become Julia Child, The French Chef, on WGBH had she not gone to the jungles of Ceylon in 1944.

Back then she was Julia McWilliams, a 31-year-old administrative assistant for the Office of Special Services. Until World War II came along, she’d been the carefree socialite daughter of a wealthy California banker. All that changed when she got a job with the OSS in Washington, D.C. Her cheerfulness and drive earned her promotions and exciting overseas postings.

Julia Child

She had tried to join the Women’s Army Corps (WACs) and the Navy’s Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES), but at 6’2” she was too tall. She started out in the OSS as a typist in the Washington, D.C., headquarters. Then she got a promotion to a top-secret researcher for Gen. William J. Donovan, the head of the agency. She worked on a team developing a shark repellent.

On April 29, 1944, Julia McWilliams’ orders came through: She was transferred from Washington, D.C., to Ceylon.

Julia Child, Administrative Assistant

Her personnel file reads:

This is to notify you that the Office of Strategic Services has taken the following action concerning your employment.

Nature of action: Transfer

Effective date: 29 April 1944

Her title: Administrative assistant.

In Kandy, Ceylon, she registered, catalogued and channeled a great volume of highly classified communications. She worked nights and half days on Sunday doing tedious paperwork. “I hate this work,” she told her diary.

But she loved the people – sophisticated and adventurous spies who were also anthropologists, professors, biologists, cryptologists and engineers.

Paul Child

She wasn’t impressed at first with Paul Child, one of her OSS colleagues in Ceylon. Child had lived as an artist and poet in Paris, where he developed an appreciation for fine cuisine. Julia didn’t think he was attractive: too short, bald with an unbecoming moustache and an unbecoming nose. Besides, at 42 he was too old for her. Paul thought she had nice legs and a pleasantly crazy sense of humor, but she wasn’t his type.

One Sunday, Julia McWilliams joined Paul Child and some friends on an expedition to photograph elephants. She then decided she found him quite attractive.

Romance didn’t bloom yet. Paul was posted to Kunming, China, and Julia followed him. They hated the Army food – rice, potatoes, canned tomatoes. Together they explored the Chinese food in local restaurants. Then they were transferred to Chongqing, where they continued their culinary adventures.

It wasn’t until Paul was posted to Beijing and Julia was back in Washington that Paul finally realized how much he missed her. He wrote her a love letter, which she received a month later.

They married in Lumberville, Pa., on Sept. 1, 1946.

With thanks to Dearie, The Remarkable Life of Julia Child by Bob Spitz. This story updated in 2022.

Image: Julia sampling food By Lynn Gilbert – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51678880.

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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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