LOWELL -- Patrick Mogan saw the potential in Lowell. He always felt it was, or could be, a great city, even if nobody else did.
"It would aggravate him when people talked about Venice," said Mogan's niece, Mary Ellen Fitzpatrick. "He would say 'Lowell's got more canals than Venice!' "
Mogan, one of the major forces behind Lowell's cultural and economic resurgence, died Friday morning at his home in Lowell at the age of 94.
Known as "The Father of Lowell National Historical Park," Mogan was the visionary of the Lowell park. When the National Park Service wanted to reach more urban audiences in the 1970s, Mogan saw an opportunity to transform Lowell into the city he thought it should be.
"When I was a freshman in high school, I sat at a family gathering and Uncle Pat said that the only way to bring Lowell back was to make it a national park" said nephew Jimmy Pollard. "All the older people rolled their eyes, but me, being young and naive, asked him if he meant for it to be like Yosemite, and he said yes."
Mogan, along with Rep. Bradford Morse and later U.S. Sen. Paul Tsongas, fought to push for approval of the park through Congress, eventually succeeding in 1978. The National Park Service was initially skeptical of the idea of a cultural park (as opposed to a natural one), but Mogan eventually swayed them.
"He was revolutionary in the sense that he was talking about the whole city being a museum without walls, with the heritage of the city being the content material," said Paul Marion, executive director of community and cultural affairs at UMass Lowell. "He felt Lowell was important because it was a living exhibit of the process and consequences of the Industrial Revolution."
A native of Norwood born to Irish immigrant parents on March 24, 1918, Mogan went to Norwood High School and graduated from Boston College in 1940, while also later getting his masters and doctorate degrees in elementary education from Boston University and UMass Amherst respectively. He served in World War II in both the Pacific and European theaters, after which he began his career as a teacher.
He was the principal of the Morey, Molloy and Reilly schools in Lowell before he served as superintendent from 1977 to 1982. His wife Mary, who died in November 2010, had been a teacher as well.
"Him and Mary didn't have any children, but every kid in the city was theirs," said Marie Sweeney, a community activist who knew Mogan since he came to the Reilly School in the 1960s."
"He ended up spreading out into all these things but ultimately, at the end of the day he saw himself as nothing less or nothing more than a teacher," said Pollard.
Mogan felt that education was important to everybody, not just children. When he was superintendent, he spearheaded the creation of the full-time Lowell Adult Education Center, which continues to support foreign-speaking immigrants and high school dropouts trying to continue their education.
"He was such a proponent of people who came to this country, learned English, worked one or two jobs and tried to better themselves," said Mogan's longtime friend Fred Abisi, whom Mogan appointed as the head of the program at its inception in 1977. "He knew education was the key to it all, so he wanted to make sure immigrants had that opportunity."
Pat Mogan changed downtown Lowell for the better, and it's clear that many people aren't going to forget that anytime soon.
"Before he came along, we were insular and we really had no sense of what was positive about Lowell," said Sweeney. "People would go to school in Lowell and couldn't get out of here fast enough, it's not like that anymore."
"As the Father of the Lowell National Park, he sought to capture the history of the American Industrial Revolution in an unprecedented way," said U.S. Rep. Niki Tsongas. "At his core, he was a remarkable educator, of children, of adults, and of a community, whose legacy will shape generations to come. I was saddened to hear of his death but am so grateful for his life."
"What Francis Cabot Lowell was to the original Lowell," said Marion, "Pat Mogan was to modern Lowell"
Mogan's wake will be at Mahoney Funeral Home in Lowell; the date and time have not yet been set.
Follow Pete McQuaid on Twitter @sweetestpete.