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, 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 27, 1998: Is it summer already? Concord residents enjoy a high temperature of 76 degrees.
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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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.
