Many are the memories of Christmases past at the old Item building. The holiday party kicked off with a cartload of booze magically procured by the “production guys” who got an early start on festivities. Rest of the day was a mix of good cheer and imbibing with a newspaper somehow getting written and produced.
But the holiday highlight was the choir boys who annually emerged from the building’s rafters, none worse for the wear in their cream and robin red robes with their page boy haircuts and cherubic faces.
I think I graced a previous column with someone’s recollection of the days when the Item played Christmas music from loudspeakers mounted on the building. It’s easy to imagine “Silent Night” booming across Central Square while shoppers browse along Union Street and dart in and out of the stores, spending their money downtown to keep their neighbors and friends employed.
Downtown shopping went the way of the rotary-dial phone. But the city still takes pride in all of the people who make an effort to organize and put on the Christmas Eve Santa parade winding across the city and in and out of neighborhoods.
A dive deep into the Item vault uncovered the city’s former Christmas festival, launched in 1949. The Daily Evening Item was among the festival’s sponsors along with the Lynn Retail Trade Bureau.
Lynn merchants contributed an impressive $5,500 in 1961 to help decorate downtown with the city kicking in money. The festival’s pre-Thanksgiving kickoff involved downtown stores staying open until 9:30 p.m. and maintaining evening hours through Dec. 23.
“A mammoth street parade” opened the festival and Veterans Memorial Auditorium and the Paramount Theatre hosted children’s holiday shows. The 1961 shows featured Fu Ling, “mandarin master of mystery;” Buzzy Baloney, and Mal Robbins, balloon sculptor.
Participating stores included Burrows & Sanborn; Goldberg’s; F.W. Woolworth; T.W. Rogers; Arthur Stern Jewelers; Ben Brown Music; Henry the Hatter; Raymond’s; Rooks; Besse-Rolfe and Tannen Shoe.
Trumpeters in 1967 heralded the holiday “Journey to Bethlehem” procession around the Lynn armory and onto the Common. Junior high students and Girls’ Club of Lynn members sang carols. Ten years later, the Item provided this thumbnail summary of the evening: “The throng of Greater Lynners who annually turn out for the pageant will watch ‘The Journey’ as the participants wind their way to Classical High [the former North Common Street school] – where shepherds will be ‘abiding in the fields’ – then to ‘The Inn’ (the Armory) and finally to the ‘The Manger’ on Lynn Common.”
Some great Lynn residents participated in the festival, including Hal Bowden who played Joseph in 1977, Tracy Battle and Larry Lowe.
Former Lynn deputy school superintendent Dr. George F. Laubner said the Lynn “Journey to Bethlehem” was inspired by a similar pageant put on in Rockport.
The only complications the pageant faced over the years was a balky donkey and a missing soloist.
Flash back to 1952 for “…the thrilling spectacle of thousands of carollers (sic) crowded into Cosgrove Square… ” for a holiday sing-along.
“The stage was illuminated by a spotlight from the roof of the Boston and Maine Railroad station office and spotlights atop the Item building…” The Item Christmas Carol Sing started in 1951 and by 1957, Veterans Memorial Auditorium in City Hall hosted the evening with featured musicians including Lynn’s own Alice Farnsworth, a rising opera star in the 1950s, who flew from Europe to Boston to sing in her hometown.
By 1969, the caroling night brought 2,000 people into the auditorium with the expansive stage featuring a succession of holiday-themed sets. In 1972, the carol evening dovetailed with the “Journey to Bethlehem” on the Common. The journey proceeded well into the 1980s while the caroling slipped into a hiatus only to be revived in 1998.
The city’s holiday celebrations, in each and every form they have taken over the decades, are another opportunity to celebrate what’s great about Lynn and to look in a unified way to the new year ahead.
