March 27, 1965: Penacook school district voters will have several options before them: creating a cooperative school district with neighboring towns, merging with Concord or going it alone. Eventually, voters will approve creation of the Merrimack Valley School District.
March 27, 2002: The Capitol Center for the Arts lifted the curtain this month on an ambitious $3 million capital campaign to give the city a sleeker, more functional and attractive focal point, the Monitor reports. If successful, supporters say the project will cement the center’s future as the premier cultural arts venue in northern New England.
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 coarse 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, 1830: Meeting on Fast Day at Concord’s Old North Church, leading citizens resolve to form the city’s first temperance society.
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, 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 Gators, defeats the North Carolina Tarheels, 71-59, to advance to the national 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 School 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.
