March 8, 1973: Gov. Mel Thomson makes a surprise visit to the state hospital kitchen and declares that the patients are being fed “poorly and revoltingly.” He orders samples of the food to be brought to the State House to be viewed by legislators and reporters.
March 8, 1987: Ray Barham’s first column appears in the Monitor. Barham is serving life without parole at New Hampshire State Prison for a 1981 murder.
March 8, 2001: Carolyn Bradley, principal of Concord’s Rundlett Middle School, announces she will resign at the end of the school year. Bradley has earned praise for her work in Concord and elsewhere in the state, but some will most remember her collection of eyeglasses: 13 pairs, a shade to match every suit.
March 9, 1812: Town meeting voters in Concord declare “that no swine be allowed to run at large on the road from Concord bridge to Boscawen bridge under a penalty to the owner of 25 cents for each offense.”
March 9, 1943: A winter for the ages continues as the temperature in Concord falls to 16 below zero. Just three weeks earlier, the city suffered through its coldest day ever recorded, when the mercury fell to 37 below.
March 10, 1853: The town of Concord holds its last town meeting – and then votes to become a city by a vote of 828-559.
March 10, 1991: A funeral tribute is held at the Monitor for former longtime editor Tom Gerber, who died Feb. 22. Steve Winship, Gerber’s old friend and fellow Dartmouth College alum, places a green hood over Gerber’s typewriter. On the hood is this motto: “Words, words, words.”
March 10, 2000: A 7-year-old boy crossing Loudon Road on his way to Concord’s Dame School is struck by a pickup truck and seriously injured. The accident inspires residents of the Heights to press city officials for better traffic signals and more clearly marked crosswalks.
March 11, 1734: Its right to self-government recognized seven years after the first white settlers arrive, Rumford in Essex County, Mass., convenes its first town meeting at 2 p.m. In time the town will be known as Concord, N.H.
March 11, 2000: After 15 months of negotiations, the Concord teachers’ union and school board have a tentative agreement on a new contract, the Monitor reports.
March 12, 2000: Bishop Guertin defeats Concord, 3-2, in the Division I hockey championship game, ending the Crimson Tide’s run of four consecutive state titles.
March 13, 1782: The Legislature meets in Concord for the first time. The site is “the Old North,” the First Congregational Church. The building will burn in 1870. It was on the site of the former Walker School.
March 13, 1852: For the third time in three years, local voters reject a plan to turn Concord from a town to a city. The vote is 458 in favor and 614 against.
March 13, 1929: Ray Barham is born. In 1981, he will murder his estranged wife’s boyfriend in Wolfeboro, earning a life sentence in New Hampshire State Prison. Six years later, he will begin writing a Monitor column that will earn him several honors including the state columnist of the year award in 1996. He will die in prison Jan. 28, 2002.
March 13, 1975: Attorney General Warren Rudman vows to fight for tougher obscenity laws so he can successfully prosecute movie house owners for showing what he describes as hard-core pornography. His comments come after the acquittal of a Bethlehem theater owner who had shown Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones.
March 13, 1993: People hunker down for what television has hyped as the “storm of the century.” Concord gets 17 inches of snow. Most roads will be clear by morning.
March 14, 1939: The Monitor reports that the task of renaming city streets has been turned over to the city planning board by an aldermanic committee which has had the job for nine months and renamed just one street.
March 14, 1947: The Monitor editorializes in favor of the construction of a city swimming pool – and a plan to charge swimmers a fee: “It is no more unreasonable to expect swimmers to pay something for this privilege than it is to expect golfers at Beaver Meadow or tennis players at Memorial Field to pay enough to cover the costs of their sport.”
March 14, 1948: For the second day in a row, the low temperature in Concord is 11 below zero. The normal March low for the 20th century is 22 above.
March 14, 1996: In Concord three weeks after the presidential primary, Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska says if he is to run for president in 2000, he will have to find a burning desire within him. He learned from his unsuccessful 1992 run, he says, that being angry with George Bush was an inadequate reason. Ultimately, Kerrey will bow out.
March 14, 2000: Kearsarge Regional School District voters reject plans to launch the state’s first charter school. “There were still some voters out there who didn’t understand what a charter school was,” says Susan Farber, a founding member of the charter school effort.
March 14, 2001: Top-seeded Nashua survives a scare from No. 4 Concord in the semifinals of the Class L girls’ basketball tournament. The Purple Panthers win, 44-41.
