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Thin and small, socially unsure, the young Tsongas spent most of his free hours toiling in his father's dry cleaning store. There he bent wire into countless coat hangers and served behind the counter. "Paul was introverted," Thaleia recalls. "His identity comes from within himself."
At Dartmouth College, his narrow life continued. "I wasn't up to joining a fraternity," he recalls. Instead he fixed his mind on an impossible goal: he would win a swimming letter. Tsongas practiced maniacally. His senior year he got a varsity letter. It was his first real success.
After graduation in 1962, Tsongas joined the Peace Corps and spent two years in an Ethiopian village. The experience, he says, was the most compelling of his life. "For the first time ever," says Tsongas, "people liked me." He taught at a rural school, helped students build a dormitory, raced his horse on the village's main street. Then at Yale Law School, Tsongas remembers, he was miserable all over again. The change from village life to law libraries somehow depressed him. The Yale years, Tsongas says, were the unhappiest period of his life.
He returned home to Lowell, its red brick textile mills having long ago deteriorated, to practice law. In 1969 he ran for the city council and won. Elected as a reformer, he began to show a more forceful side. Soon he was bucking the city's seedy political hierarchy, whose members openly ridiculed him. Tsongas discovered the abuse did not intimidate him. Gradually he won respect. Elected to Congress, he helped secure large sums of government money that spurred Lowell's dramatic revival.
He jostled some. Former city manager Bill Taupier remembers the Senator sticking his nose into everything. "Things had to be his way," says Taupier. But by then little could dim the Tsongas luster. He was riding high. In Washington he was a member of the Senate's prestigious Foreign Relations Committee. In Lowell he was the city's first citizen.
One September morning in 1983, his life stopped in its tracks. Showering, Tsongas discovered a lump in his groin. It was diagnosed as lymphoma. Even though that kind of cancer is normally responsive to treatment, Tsongas decided to leave the Senate.
In 1986 his doctor, Tak Takvorian, proposed a radical new bone-marrow transplant. Five percent of his bone marrow was withdrawn by needle, purged of cancer cells and frozen. Tsongas remembers the day his doctor appeared holding the good marrow in a test tube. There was his life, Tsongas thought, pressed into a tube. What if the doctor dropped it? The cleansed marrow was reintroduced into his body. In an isolated room at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Tsongas waited six weeks for the result. The transplant worked.
Today Tsongas measures time from that September morning in the shower. The first day of each month he enters the elapsed time into his calendar. This June he reached 2,804 days. Doctors say there is little likelihood the cancer will return. Politically, the issue is far from settled.