Lowell Paul McLaughlin
I have to say that I have issues with Paul, but I feel the need to praise him very highly. Paul married my mother in the 1950s after my father died in 1955. There had been nothing but poverty in the family for many years. My mother usually did not know where the next meal was coming from while my father constantly searched for enough work and battled chronic illness till his death at 47 years old. The poor man, good as he was, never had a chance. I am young enough to have missed all that as I was only two and a half when he died.
Paul was a great guy. He was a hard worker. He unselfishly worked for the rest of their life together to raise and support his stepchildren to various degrees. My sister Mary was not there for many years as she married in 1958, but my brother did all of his High School and Maine Maritime years till the mid sixties under his roof. I was there at home and at college till the early seventies, becoming fairly independant in my later college years. However he was always there with help and support for many years. Through much of that time, my mother was unable to give him children and spent all the years from the late sixties through the end of the century with MS and a number of other ailments that drained him emotionally and financially. He worked tirelessly on a rather old and decrepit house that he brought back from a very sad state along with gardens and property to mow and maintain.
I cannot express what this man did for our family. Where would we have been had he not been in the picture? I shudder to think.