Author: Eli Pekelny

  • Heat assistance remains delayed for Waltham residents despite government reopening

    Federal funding for heat assistance has been restored after a 43-day government shutdown, but money won’t arrive in Massachusetts for another four to six weeks, leaving many Waltham residents wondering how they’ll heat their homes in the meantime. 

    Massachusetts received $144 million for the program last year. More than half of the 159,000 residents who received assistance last year were seniors. Ten percent of families had a child younger than the age of 5.

    Ann Sirois, chief planning and development officer for Community Teamwork, the nonprofit organization that helps administer the program in Waltham and in more 70 other towns in Massachusetts, said payments are on the way.

    “There may be a delay in payments being issued, but the money will be coming,” said Sirois. “I don’t want folks to feel like because there is a delay that they shouldn’t apply. It is really important that they go ahead and apply.”

    Sirois said only emergency situations will be considered for immediate funding. She also said there is a moratorium in place, which means that utility companies cannot shut off gas or electric services.

    “There still certainly is the stress of seeing that bill mount until that assistance is applied to it,” Sirois said, “but the moratorium should protect folks. There won’t be any shutoff notices issued.”

    The moratorium does not protect those who heat their homes with fuel oil, which is used in about a quarter of Massachusetts homes. 

    It also doesn’t help that shutdown-inspired budget cuts led to three of the energy team’s nine employees being laid off. 

    The staff reduction “certainly slows down the application process,” said Sirois. “We have … over 7,000 applications in hand that staff are working on processing.”

    Ben Stone, a Waltham resident and digital customer success manager at United Rentals, agrees that layoffs will only delay the application screening process.

    “It’s really sad to think about somebody having to consider wearing five sweatshirts inside instead of bumping their heat up a couple degrees,” said Stone. “I know a lot of people around here work really hard — extra shifts, paying for folks in their family to go to school, to eat, whatever — anytime that budget slips over, even by just a few dollars, it can be really devastating.”

    Waltham resident Tim Bagnall, 66, said he has been receiving heat assistance since 1980. Out of necessity, he said he typically stretches his budget, including heat assistance, down to the very last penny. 

    “It hurts in the stomach,” Bagnall said after hearing about the delay in funding. “It’s not much money at all.”

  • Waltham Philharmonic’s season opens Sunday with works by Coleridge-Taylor and Dvořák

    The Waltham Philharmonic Orchestra opens its 2025-26 season on Sunday with a concert celebrating the 150th anniversary of composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s birth.

    This event marks the orchestra’s first concert since May. The concert’s repertoire will include two Coleridge-Taylor pieces, “Idyll” and “Violin Concerto,” as well as composer Antonín Dvořák’s “Symphony No. 8.”

    Coleridge-Taylor is a Black British composer, conductor and virtuoso who is known as an underappreciated artist in the classical music world. The composer’s choral trilogy, Song of Hiawatha, composed in 1898–1900, was well known and widely performed in his day, but his works are relatively unknown today. 

    The orchestra’s Music Director Michael Korn said Coleridge-Taylor’s style of composition produced “exceptionally beautiful music” that is rarely performed. 

    “On the other hand, he’s an extremely original composer,” Korn said. “You can always hear the influence of Black music in his compositions.”

    Korn said one notable thing about Coleridge-Taylor is that the composer’s music weaves West African and European romantic styles together. He said Coleridge-Taylor’s obscurity can be partly attributed to the racial discrimination and biases that many believe still exist in the classical music world.

    “I do think that [Coleridge-Taylor] became marginalized because, in general, for Black composers, it was much harder to make it … in the classical music realm,” Korn said.

    In recent years, Coleridge-Taylor has been rediscovered. His music has been performed recently by the Minnesota Orchestra and the London Mozart Players, to name a few. He was also profiled in The New York Times.

    The concert is Sunday from 3 to 5 p.m. at the Waltham Government Center, located at 119 School St. Tickets are $29 for adults. Children younger than 17 will be admitted free of charge. For more information, see the Waltham Philharmonic Orchestra’s website.

  • ‘Echoes of Home’ inspired Brandeis junior’s Waltham Family School mural

    Brandeis University junior Alanis Gonzalez comes from a family of creatives.

    Not only is Gonzalez’s mother an artist, but her grandmother is as well. In Gonzalez’s youth, her grandmother collected discarded items from the streets of the Dominican Republic — think coins, keyboard keys and paper clips — to create a collage of trash on canvas. Gonzalez considers this piece of art to be something from nothing. It’s her favorite. 

    So when Gonzalez got the chance to coordinate the painting of a mural for the Waltham Family School, she knew what her vision would be.

    “I really wanted to hone into something that was a personal experience for some of my family members,” Gonzalez said. “But I also wanted to amplify the voices of others in the Waltham community.”

    The Waltham Family School, a local English language program for immigrant families, unveiled the “Echoes of home/Ecos del hogar” mural to a crowd of about 50 supporters, including Mayor Jeannette A. McCarthy, on Friday. 

    The school’s program director, Jackie Herrera, said the curriculum serves children and their parents who want to improve their English and workplace skills. The school offers field trips, Chromebooks and scholarships for students who need extra help.

    The mural depicts three women at different stages of motherhood, surrounded by butterflies and flowers that represent the students’ native countries.

    “Everybody felt very engaged and connected to the process,” Herrera said. “And I think that that’s what created such a beautiful mural.” 

    Gonzalez, who is from Newark, N.J., said she knew she wanted to leave her mark on Waltham as early as her freshman year at Brandeis. By chance, Herrera visited one of Gonzalez’s classes to discuss The Waltham Family School and its mission. She was hooked.

    “I was like, I’m gonna work with [Herrera]. I literally told her that after she left the classroom,” Gonzalez said. “Like, ‘Don’t forget about me.’” 

    From shared stories to the final design

    When Gonzalez received funding from Brandeis’ Rich/Collins Fellowship, she reached out to Herrera, who mentioned the school had bare walls. Gonzalez knew that had to change.

    “We didn’t just want to draw art,” Gonzalez said. “We wanted to draw something that represented (students) and their experiences.”

    With the help of volunteers from Brandeis, students and a local professional muralist, Tova Speter, the four-month process of painting the wall began.

    “The mural process started with a community input event,” Speter said. “We engaged in a series of activities that included verbal brainstorming, written brainstorming and visual brainstorming.” The second step involved melding the community’s various ideas into a cohesive design. Then the tracing and painting began, mostly by volunteers from Brandeis. 

    “Having this mural at the Waltham Family School is just a lasting visual representation of what the program means to the students and to the community,” Speter said.

    Herrera said the opportunities offered at Waltham Family School are for everyone, regardless of their background.

    “My mom was a teen mother, and my grandmother raised me,” Herrera said. “I have no doubt that if my mom had had a program like this, her life would have been very different.”

  • Annual Metz Day celebrates Waltham’s automotive past

    Ten-year-old River Bernstein owns a car. 

    It’s a classic 1906 Orient Buckboard – manufactured by the Waltham Manufacturing Company under the leadership of Charles Herman Metz – and a recent gift from his grandparents, Frank and Linda Bernstein. 

    But the sixth grader at Gideon Welles Middle School in Glastonbury, Conn., says his classmates are skeptical of his story. “So I say, I have a car. They say, ‘No, you don’t, you’re too young to have a car.’ And I say, ‘Look, I’ll show you a picture.’” But even that doesn’t convince them. “Kids,” Bernstein said, rolling his eyes.

    Bernstein’s grandparents hauled the car to the Waltham Museum Saturday from more than 100 miles away. It was one of about a dozen vintage vehicles on display at the 16th annual Metz Day Saturday, a celebration of Waltham’s industrial history.

    About 40 people admired the Waltham-made pre-war automobiles, which were built from about 1895 to 1931. The event also featured a lecture by George King, a seasoned auto restorer from Franklin, Conn. He spoke about how he restored a 1901 Orient. In fact, young Bernstein restored his Orient Buckboard under King’s mentorship. 

    “The fact that we are here in the town where [the cars] were built, it’s just the right kind of event,” King said on his first Metz Day.

    After leaving the Waltham Manufacturing Company in 1902 due to disagreements with investors, New York-native Metz decided to begin his own manufacturing company under his own last name — hence the event’s name.

    The Metz Company, which started up soon after Metz’s departure from the Waltham Manufacturing Company, specialized in bicycles, motorcycles and automobiles. Metz is actually credited with creating the first American motorcycle in 1898.

    What was special about Metz automobiles, which were mainly sold from around 1909 to 1921, was their offering of the “plan car.” Instead of selling the entire vehicle fully assembled, Metz sold the parts in a kit, which buyers used to assemble their own vehicles. This business model helped make Metz automobiles among the most affordable of their time. About 44,000 were produced at a cost of $495. Today, restorers say it takes about $20,000 to bring a Metz back to life – if you can find or build the parts. A fully assembled car can cost $40,000.

    The company eventually lost its traction in the 20’s after the sinking of the British luxury liner RMS Lusitania. The German name “Metz” fell out of favor with many Americans, but not among the brand’s loyalists. Bill Metz is one such devotee. He has collected about three Metz vehicles ranging from 1915 to 1917.

    “What brought … a Metz car into my garage, was the fact that my name is Metz,” he said, laughing, knowing he isn’t related to Charles Herman Metz. “The more I looked into it, the more interested I got.”

    His wife, Lynette, described her husband’s obsession another way:  

    “It is an illness,” she said, giggling. “Anything that’s Metz-related, he collects.”

    Even so, Lynette noticed that passersby also caught the bug Saturday.

    “When they drive by and they see [the cars], they get drawn to them,” she said. “This day actually makes people aware of all of the history that Waltham has.”

    Tom Arena, director of the Waltham Museum’s board, wanted to highlight the Metz company as a way to highlight Waltham itself.

    “Part of it’s just civic pride and part of it’s [a desire] not to exist in a bubble,” he said. “History is important… It’s a tip of the hat, an acknowledgement of that effort and that meaning. Hopefully we can preserve some of that and share it with the kids today.”drinks, they can have cars displayed out front,” Ogarkov said. “It’s a very wonderful thing that, yeah, I’m glad to be a part of.”