Beat Scene magazine, published by Kevin Ring in England, with 110 issues to date, has a blog called More Beat Scene First Words in which Kevin reviewed Charlie Gargiulo’s Legends of Little Canada memoir. This blog post is from July 24, 2024.
Late last night I found a package had come through my letterbox. I was just about to go to bed. It was a long day. The day had started at 5 a.m. for me. My wife was away in London with our daughter. So it had been a full on working day for me. It was a book. Legends of Little Canada by someone called Charlie Gargiulo. Now I know Charlie, first met him in Lowell, Massachusetts maybe about 45 years ago. Roughly my age and someone I took an instant liking to. He was a young bloke who showed me around Kerouac’s Lowell. I’d been there a few times before and other Lowellites had shown similar kindness. Back then Charlie was passionate about social equality, a fair deal for working people. And he wasn’t afraid to shake people up in working towards that. And into the mix, he loved Jack Kerouac’s works, even though he told me he was late in discovering him. You probably won’t believe this, but in the 1970s in Lowell Kerouac was a dirty secret. The average resident had never heard of him. Jack Who? I heard this everywhere I went. But there was a pocket of people who tried to keep his name alive in the city. Charlie was right at the heart of that. Charlie had a bunch of friends, to my surprise they were all big into British pop music. The Dave Clark Five of all bands. It puzzled me. Their heyday was long gone. But we had a fun night listening to their LPs and bands like The Kinks. It felt like a time warp, but a good one. I visited a few more times in the 1980s. And now, this book. Well, I put it on the shelf and went to bed. But my dreams woke me I’m trying to find Charlie’s house from back then. In my memory it was near a Greek church with a silver dome, by a canal. Going down all these Lowell streets near Merrimack, the main downtown street. The dream seems on a loop. I get up. Go downstairs and start reading Charlie’s book and I tell you, I’m instantly hooked. Charlie writes from the viewpoint of his 12 year self. He’s a young boy who has been forced, with his mother, to move from Dracut to Little Canada, a more affordable area. There is a reason this has happened and it is an important, crucial reason. But I won’t tell you. I want you to read this book. If you have read Kerouac you’ll know where Little Canada is, or was. It was central to Kerouac’s Lowell books, his life. And here’s Charlie Gargiulo writing about his own life there. It is the early part of the 1960s. I’m 65 pages in. And I’m hooked. Jack Kerouac was alive and sometimes living in Lowell in this decade. But he is a shadow in his hometown. The ex High School football player hero is mostly forgotten in these times. Not sure what’s coming next in Charlie’s book. He’s facing his schoolkid demons. The Catholic church looms large. The priests and the nuns. The book is about Charlie Gargiulo’s Little Canada, a gritty working class area of Lowell. These are his young boy’s memories of it. Beautiful.