News, views, clues, oooohs, rues and stews in and about Lowell, Massachusetts, USA
Affluent mothers from Belvidere are collecting signatures to force a meeting with owners of Lowell Lock Monsters, this city's most popular minor league hockey franchise. Angry parents and their supporters in the mental health professions claim mascot "Louie, the Lock Monster" frightens their children.
Team spokesmen contacted refused to comment on the allegations. "Louie" is a purple dragon that lives in the city's canal system, the first built in the United States. Marketing minor league hockey as family entertainment, the Monsters media guide claims that Louie "represents an endearing cuddly image to be embraced by kids from 5 to 105."
Karen Henderson of Trull Brook Road disagrees. Mother of three, she says, "My Justin doesn't see a hockey team logo as he goes to sleep. He sees a hockey stick weilding dragon with a mouthful of razor sharp teeth hell bent on eating him."
His grandmother Mary Ann Muldoon, 49, of Chelmsford adds, "Or beating him with the stick. In his sleep!"
She claims to have spotted Louie herself. " I was driving down Central Street with Justin. Stuck in traffic. We were picking up his mother at the Inizio Day Spa. It was a dark December evening. Justin screamed as he looked toward the canal. I looked over and saw two dragon eyes and the blade of a hockey stick staring at my grandson, between the sidewalk and bottom railing. Thank God the light changed."
"You know, people think we're a bunch of wackos," she continues. "Well, they thought the people who saw Bigfoot in the Lowell-Dracut State Forest were nuts, too! Until he knocked on Kendall Wallace's back door for a Saturday Chat."
delegation here in Lowell. I became aware of a rhythmic rattling that I figured out was some kind of breathing."
"There was a loud knock on the door. I could see him through the window and motioned him in. He was drenched and, yes, he was smelly, very smelly. He sat on the couch. I was a bit too uncomfortable to ask him to dry himself off, so we began chatting.
"For a creature so socially isolated I was a bit surprised at his grasp of the economic revitalization of the Merrimack Valley."
"Go ahead; call me crazy. I met him myself. I couldn't understand a damn word he said. But, you know, he was still kind of articulate. I was hoping to get a column out of it but my notes were all grunts and snorts."
Old-Fashioneds
