• 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, 1945: Local grocers break the bad news even to customers who put in their orders early: Because of wartime shortages, there will be no hams for Easter this year.
• March 30, 1965: The New Hampshire Education Association makes a pitch for a standard minimum teachers salary of $5,000 per year. More than 40 percent of the state's public school teachers currently make less. Legislative leaders from both parties say they're wary of interfering with local control.
• March 31, 1968: Nineteen days after Sen. Eugene McCarthy captured 42 percent of the Democratic vote in the New Hampshire primary, President Lyndon B Johnson tells a national television audience: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”
• 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.”
• 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, 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, 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 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 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 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.
