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to do a full career to retirement in the Air Force--he may have been 'local' for his last tour on USAF active duty, and certainly while in the National Guard (and that HAD to be part-time, weekend warrior duty), but I suspect he had tours outside of Massachusetts -- certainly outside the Merrimack Valley. He's being disingenuous if he suggests he never left home. And that farm he runs? It was his DEAD BROTHER's, that he bought for a song from the in-laws--he acts like a homespun guy, but he wouldn't be able to call himself "farmer Jim" if his poor brother hadn't plowed into that building. There's just a dreadful smell of opportunism around the guy. I sometimes wonder if his brother wasn't a DEMOCRAT, too. You cannot get a sense of how the guy mangles the King's English from reading these blurbs and quotes, but his style is to pronounce 'this,' 'those,' or 'the' by substituting "D" for "Th"--he sounds like a thick nitwit: For the past six years, Jim Ogonowski has run White Gate Farm, the 100-plus-acre hay and produce outfit that his late brother, John, a Vietnam veteran and airline pilot, purchased in the 1990s with the help of the state's Agricultural Preservation Restriction program. John Ogonowski was the captain of American Airlines Flight 11 that was hijacked and flown into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
Until his retirement from the armed services this year, Ogonowski tended to his late brother's farm while working full time as a lieutenant colonel at Pease Air National Guard Base in New Hampshire. There, he commanded the Tanker Task Force Mission, planning and coordinating the movement and in-air refueling of fighter jets going between Pease and Southwest Asia or Europe. Jim Ogonowski retired after 28 years of combined service with the Air Force and the Guard, rather than accept a promotion to colonel that would have required him to move to Illinois, he said...He said he didn't want to leave his parents and his children - Charlie, 20, and Catherine, 18 - to say nothing of the 200-plus other relatives he says he has in the Merrimack Valley....
...At White Gate, Ogonowski continues a program started by his brother that gives farm plots to Cambodian refugees.
He lives not far from the farm in a renovated garage. Ogonowski, who often says he's just the "guy that lives next door," bought the property from his former in-laws for $70,000 a decade ago, to stay in the neighborhood after a divorce. His ex-wife lived down the street, and each parent saw the children daily.
"I don't know if there's a perfect environment in a divorce, but that's about as close to it as you can get," said Ogonowski, who remarried two years ago, to a woman on the hay-delivery route he assumed from his brother.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/10/09/life_on_the_trail_with_5th_district_candidates/?page=2
And our Niki wasn't selling flowers and hay, she was actually working for the community (as a Dean at Middlesex, among other duties), so I do think the Retired LIGHT Colonel's assertions were a cheap shot: http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/10/09/tsongas_is_picking_up_the_pace_amid_already_intense_campaign?mode=PFTsongas grew up on military bases in three continents, the daughter of an Air Force colonel, and went to high school in Japan. She was on a ship traveling from San Francisco to Tokyo at 14 when she caught a radio broadcast of John F. Kennedy's nomination speech in 1960, a moment of optimism and opportunity that she said kindled her political interest.
She met Paul Tsongas at a party in Washington, D.C., in 1967, when she was a Smith College student on summer break and he was a congressional intern. After graduation, she spent a year in New York as a social worker, then moved to Lowell in 1969 to marry and help Paul with his first bid for City Council. That campaign and all that followed have been about the desire to effect change, she said.
"That's the thing - I don't want to say inherited - that we shared all along," she said, speaking of her relationship with Paul. "It's not just enough to be against something. You have to be for something, and if you're for something you have to commit to follow through and make sure that that change takes place."
Tsongas spent 35 years in Lowell - including 10 years going back and forth to Washington - as a worker for nonprofits, a mother of three, a partner in politics, and the rock in the family during Paul's fights with the cancer that was first discovered in 1983. She also earned a law degree in 1988 and ran a small practice in Lowell before Paul's 1991-92 presidential run.
After her husband's death in 1997, she served on a variety of Lowell boards, including a city commission that oversaw management of the city's minor-league ballpark and the Tsongas Arena. She also accepted a position at Middlesex Community College in Lowell, creating a department to raise money for the public institution, engage the community, and elevate the school's profile. This year, she took an unpaid leave from her job there as dean of external affairs to run for office.
Four years ago, Tsongas bought a townhouse in Charlestown and moved out of Lowell. She wanted to be closer to her older two daughters. She continued to work in Lowell and consider it home, she said.
She rented an apartment in a converted downtown mill in Lowell when it appeared Martin T. Meehan might leave Congress. John Kerry's first run for Congress was in that district--he was a real cahpitbaggah, there, though, so he didn't make the cut. It gave him good experience, though. He learned a lot about what NOT to do from that run...
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