April 1, 2000: Concord’s Matt Bonner gets a taste of Final Four basketball as a freshman, scoring four points and grabbing two rebounds in 14 minutes of play. His team, the University of Florida, defeats North Carolina, 71-59, to advance to the championship game.
April 1, 1891: William M. Chase, a prominent Concord lawyer and longtime school board member and a trustee of Dartmouth College, is appointed an associate justice on the state Supreme Court.
April 1, 1997: In a bout of April Fools weather on baseball’s Opening Day, Concord gets seven inches of snow.
April 1, 1878: Shortly after midnight, April Fools pranksters dig up the body of executed murderer Joseph Lapage. They take it to the State House yard and suspend it from a gibbet-shaped water pipe frame. Special Detective E.B. Craddock and Officer Foster cut it down and bring it to Foster’s stable behind the Phenix Hotel.
April 1, 1830: Meeting on Fast Day at Concord’s Old North Church, leading citizens resolve to form the city’s first temperance society.
April 1, 1861: Charles J. French is born. He will grow up to be mayor of Concord, serving from 1909 to 1915 and again in 1918-19. “He was a remarkably able vote-getter, winning over many strong men who wished to obtain the coveted position as chief executive of the city,” reports the Granite Monthly magazine. French was also an accomplished wrestler and umpire.
April 2, 1851: Concord’s town meeting votes to end the tolling of bells at funerals. The practice, the resolution says, “is productive of no good, and may, in case of the illness of the living, result in evil.”
April 2, 1835: A second temperance society is formed in Concord. It calls itself the Concord Total Abstinence Society and will attract mainly middle-aged men. The city’s Temperance Society already has 262 members, including 92 women.
April 3, 1945: Word reaches Concord that Staff Sgt. F. Hamilton Kibbee was killed on Jan. 31 while a prisoner of war in Germany. His wife Mary, who lives on South Street, last heard from him Jan. 7. The Kibbees have two children, ages 4 and 21 months.
April 3, 1909: In perhaps the first full-page automobile ad in the Monitor, Concord dealer Fred Johnson describes in detail the new Buick “Model 17 Touring Car.” It has five seats, two in front, three in back, a steering wheel rather than a tiller, four cylinders and 30 horsepower. A cloth folding top for rainy days is optional. The price: $1,750. It is the first decade of the popularization of the automobile. In 1900, there were 50 cars registered in New Hampshire. By 1910, there will be 3,500.
April 3, 1905: Douglas Everett is born. Everett will become a member of the 1932 U.S. Olympic hockey team, win a silver medal and be inducted into the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame. The Everett Arena in Concord will be named in his honor.
April 3, 1994: Pitching for the St. Louis Cardinals on Opening Day, Concord’s Bob Tewksbury defeats the Cincinnati Reds. The highlight is Tewksbury’s two-run double over the head of Reds center fielder Roberto Kelly.
April 4, 1983: Concord City Clerk Marjorie Foote retires after 19 years on the job. “I knew just about everything that was going on with people in this city,” she recalls.
April 4, 1974: Gov. Mel Thomson signs legislation reinstating the death penalty in New Hampshire. “I feel like John Hancock when he finished putting his signature on the Declaration of Independence,” he says. The new law calls for death by hanging.
April 6, 1853: City government is established in Concord.
April 6, 1978: Gov. Meldrim Thomson Jr. swears in David H. Souter as a superior court judge.
April 7, 1968: About 350 people attend a memorial service on the State House plaza for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader who was assassinated three days earlier in Memphis. In a statement drafted in conjunction with other local clergy, Rev. Paul Beattie, a Unitarian minister, suggests that nearly all-white Concord should actively seek to persify. “Concord is an ideal town for developing a full inter-racial community,” he says. “We do not have a ghetto. We do not have a street where all or most Negroes live.” He suggests that Concord invite to town “some of the black people who have lost all hope while living in the segregated squalor of urban centers.”
April 7, 1830: A committee is formed in Concord to pursue the idea of an east-west railroad line through New Hampshire and Vermont. The first train will not reach the city for 12 years, and it will come north from Boston.
April 7, 1965: The Monitor reports on plans for a new $1.2 million state liquor store on Storrs Street in Concord. “The state store is expected to become the first of its sort in the nation. Ohio has featured self-service liquor stores for a dozen years, but they have not also featured specialty liquors and wines, as planned in the model Concord store.”
