This is a web edition of GBH Daily, a weekday newsletter bringing you local stories you can trust so you can stay informed without feeling overwhelmed.
🌤️Partly sunny, with highs in the 50s and a light breeze. Sunset tonight is at 7:33 p.m.
Happy Patriots’ Day. We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to bring you athletes, re-enactors, bell-ringers and hidden histories. Hope you enjoy!
Three people to watch at the Boston Marathon:
1. Mary Ngugi, running in the elite women’s field, will be running her sixth Boston Marathon today. Back home in Nyahururu City, Kenya — about 100 miles north of the capital of Nairobi — a group of athletes will be cheering her on. Ngugi founded the Nala Run Club after a fellow Kenyan runner, Agnes Tirop, was murdered in 2021. The club is designed as a safe and empowering training space for teenage girls and young women, Ngugi explained. “They’re always watching me,” she said. “I’m not just racing for myself, I’m racing for them as well.”
2. Jason Fowler, competing in the men’s wheelchair division for the 21st time, gave us a look at his training. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Boston Marathon recognizing a wheelchair division — and the race’s first-ever wheelchair athlete, Bob Hall, talked to GBH News reporter Craig LeMoult about his history-making race.
3. Beyond the finish line: David Vogan is the man who rings the Old South Church bell for first-place finishers. The bell weighs 2,000 pounds, and to ring it he must climb a labyrinth of steps and catwalks stretching more than 200 feet into the air.
More on the 2025 Boston Marathon: What to know about the route, schedule and how to watch.
Three stories to mark Patriots’ Day:
1. A trip to the GBH archives: We found vintage recording detailing an eyewitness account of the battles at Lexington and Concord. In the 1950 recording, preserved by GBH Archives, an elderly Waltham doctor recalled his great-grandmother’s childhood account of the chaos on the first day of the American Revolutionary War.
2. Dig into old broadsides and receipts to learn about America’s Black Revolutionary War soldiers: Named among the wounded is Prince Easterbrooks, an enslaved man from Lexington who was the first Black soldier of the Revolution.
3. Were Paul Revere’s political cartoons more influential than his midnight ride? The Bostonian is best known for his perilous horseback journey 250 years ago. But scholars say his art helped fan the flames of dissent.
