March 25, 2003: The House votes to require doctors to notify the parents of girls under 18 seeking abortions. The margin is slim, 187-181. But the outcome marks a momentous political shift in the House, which has rejected dozens of attempts to limit access to abortion over the last 20 years.
March 25, 1998: Concord officials propose a change in the city’s policy toward low-income housing. If the council approves, Concord will no longer actively support the construction of low-income housing, but will support only the rehabilitation of existing buildings for low-income housing.
March 25, 1996: In a Concord motel room, Robert Blair kills his girlfriend and her handicapped child with a hammer.
March 26, 1969: The Legislature votes to cut five days off the sentences of prisoners who donate a pint of blood to the American Red Cross.
March 26, 1948: Steven Tallarico is born. In Sunapee in the late 1960s he will form his first serious band, The Strangeurs. In 1970 he’ll team up with bassist Tom Hamilton, who went to high school in New London, and guitarist Joe Perry, who once worked at a restaurant in Sunapee. The new band is called Aerosmith, and Tallarico will change his name to Tyler. The rest is rock history.
March 26, 1853: Concord elects its first mayor, Joseph Low, a grand-looking man with a gold-headed cane. Before this date, the city was a town, run by selectmen.
March 26, 1947: State Sen. Arthur Bean asks the Legislature to allow Concord and Bow to create a man-made lake on the Turkey River, to be called Concord Lake. The lake would be used for recreation and as a backup city water supply. It would be the state’s 10th largest, after Winnipesaukee, Squam, Winnisquam, Newfound, Ossipee, Wentworth, First Connecticut and Massabesic. The Legislature will approve the plan, but city voters will ultimately turn it down.
March 27, 1997: The New Hampshire House votes overwhelmingly to support the policy objective of Gov. Jeanne Shaheen’s $50 million plan to expand public kindergarten. The proposal heads now to the Finance Committee, which will debate how to pay for the plan.
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 28, 1921: Winter is barely over, but ice-out is declared on Lake Winnipesaukee.
March 28, 1919: Gov. John Bartlett signs a law prohibiting the teaching, advocacy or practice of Bolshevik ideas in New Hampshire. Bartlett issues a statement warning “Bolsheviki” that he has ordered law enforcement “to rake the state with a fine-tooth comb to find evidence of their work. … No cost will be spared to suppress the social viper.”
March 29, 2003: Parents whose children attend Concord’s Dewey School are disappointed with the proposal to move the school’s first graders to Kimball school, the Monitor reports. “Dewey has an outstanding school culture,” said Mary Carter, whose daughter already went through the school and whose two younger children will head there in the next few years. “From my experience, schools are mysterious places in terms of what makes them exceptional, what makes them places that sit in children’s minds as golden places.”
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 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 30, 2001: A spring storm drops a foot of snow across much of central N.H.
