March 28, 2003: The Concord Monitor is named New England Newspaper of the Year by the New England Newspaper Association. It is the 13th time the daily Monitor has won the award since the contest debuted 20 years ago.
March 29, 1909: George Foster, a real estate man and investor, takes over the Abbot and Downing Co., once again saving it from collapse. Foster will bail out just over two years later, and yet another new owner will try his hand.
March 29, 1945: The Monitor reports that Sgt. Walter Carlson, missing in action since Dec. 21, is now known to be a POW in Germany. Carlson, a Concord police sergeant before the war, will remain in a prison camp for 71 days before being liberated. After the war, he will be Concord’s longtime police chief.
March 30, 2002: Parking at Concord High School has been a problem for as long as anyone can remember, the Monitor reports. Now the city council has decided to do something about the parking dilemma. In its upcoming budget, the city administration plans to earmark about $40,000 to hire an expert to look for solutions.
March 31, 1731: Four years after Concord’s settlement begins, townspeople appropriate 10 pounds “for the instruction of the children in reading, etc.” The first teacher is Hannah Abbot, 30. The following year, the town will order the selectmen to “find books for the use of the inhabitants . . . on the town’s cost.”
March 31, 1791: David George, a Concord tailor, advertises his new prices: $3 for a genteel suit of superfine broadcloth; $2 for an ordinary suit of course cloth.
March 31, 1800: Concord residents vote “to accept a bell if one can be obtained by subscription, and cause the same to be rung at such times as the town may think proper.”
March 31, 2002: A Concord man found dead in his Hall Street apartment was murdered, the police announce. Tobby Publicover, a 28-year-old described as a “gentle giant” by his mother, died of a gunshot wound.
April 1, 1817: There is still “good passing on ice on the river with horses,” Benjamin Kimball, a Merrimack River ferryman, writes in his diary.
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 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, 1997: In a bout of April Fools weather on baseball’s Opening Day, Concord gets 7 inches of snow. Jaffrey gets 27 inches.
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 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 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, 1988: In a Gile concert attended by about 700 people, flutist Jean Pierre Rampal plays Concord’s city auditorium. He tells a reporter that he likes to consider the flute not an instrument but an extension of himself. When he plays well, he says, it is as though he has played no instrument at all.
April 2, 1994: Speaking in Representatives Hall to the New Hampshire Historical Society’s annual meeting, Donald Hall says of his poem “Kicking the Leaves,” whose subject is his moving to New Hampshire in 1975: “I didn’t know we were going to settle here, but the poem did.”
April 2, 2001: Concord High is forced to cancel its first tennis match of the season, and the lacrosse team works out on asphalt at the Everett Arena parking lot. The reason? All the March snow hasn’t melted.
April 3, 1865: Concord’s church bells ring and a cannon fires in response to news of the overwhelming defeat of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s army at Petersburg, Va.
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, 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, 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, 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 3, 2002: A 15-year-old female student at Concord High School says two male students sexually molested her last October after school in the bathroom and on the campus lawn, the Monitor reports. The girl’s mother is suing the district for negligence.
