April 26, 1948: On the first day of spring vacation, Concord students take to the streets of downtown brandishing placards. Their cause: a new swimming pool in West Concord. Some of the signs read “Swimming Will Make Us Strong” and “Oh Give Us Water!” The state Board of Health closed the old one as unsanitary in 1945, and a committee of the city's alderman has recommended against spending $110,000 to build a new one.
April 27, 1861: The city of Concord appropriates $10,000 to aid the families of local volunteers who go off to war. It expects the state to reimburse it, and for the most part it will. By the end of the year, the city will have doled out $3,000 to soldiers' families.
April 27, 1987: Fire breaks out in the south end of the Legislative Office Building in Concord. Hundreds gather to watch as a cool wind whips the flames pouring from the roof. Water streams out the door and down the steps into the street. The building suffers extensive smoke and water damage.
April 28, 1974: Gov. Mel Thomson returns to New Hampshire after two days in the Caribbean studying oil refineries. Thomson's office refuses to say precisely where in the Caribbean area he was.
April 29, 1948: The New Hampshire Christian Civic League, formerly known as the New Hampshire Anti-Saloon League, faces the prospect of disbanding after 50 years of fighting for prohibition. Donations have fallen off, and the organization cannot pay its bills. Nowadays, on the issue of reducing the number of people who drink alcoholic beverages, “even some of the church groups are easy-going,” laments league official Herbert Rainie.
April 29, 1964: In an editorial, the Monitor defends its opposition to the recently initiated state lottery against criticism from Manchester publisher William Loeb. The Monitor calls the lottery “a new venture born under a cloud of doubts.” Loeb has accused the Monitor of being “a minority gone mad and demanding what it wants.” The paper, he writes, is guilty of “vindictive dog-in-the-manger tactics and sabotage.”
April 29, 1987: It snows most of the afternoon and night. The accumulation is two to three inches.
April 30, 1963: New Hampshire establishes the nation's first modern state-run lottery.
April 30, 1974: Gov. Mel Thomson says President Nixon has laid the Watergate issue to rest in his nationwide address. “Nixon for almost two years has carried his cross of abuse. He has come out of the ordeal as one of America's great statesmen.”
April 30, 1697: In Penacook along the Merrimack River, Hannah Dustin and two other captives turn on the Indians who kidnapped them and killed Dustin's newborn child in March. They catch all the Indians asleep, kill 10 of them and return home to Haverhill, Mass. For the 10 scalps they bring with them, they collect a bounty of 50 pounds.
April 30, 1965: Gov. John King cuts the ribbon at the grand opening of the New Hampshire Technical Institute in Concord. Tuition for state residents will be $300 a year. Out-of-staters will pay $800.
May 1, 1891: By custom, Concord's May Horn ushers in a day of celebrating the final escape from winter. The horn is peculiar to Concord. “The 'oldest inhabitant' cannot recall a first day of May in his boyhood when the din of the horn did not reverberate in some wee hour,” the Monitor reports.
May 1, 1903: After 48 years of Prohibition, New Hampshire begins issuing licenses for liquor sales.
May 1, 1925: The Granite Monthly magazine reports approvingly that Concord, Hillsboro, Goffstown, Peterborough and Milford are all planning new high schools. “If we are to believe what some people say, that the young folks of today are headed nowhere in particular and in a hurry to get there, we are at least glad to know they are to be educated on the way.”
May 2, 1977: Two hundred seventy-seven of the 1,414 anti-nuclear demonstrators arrested at Seabrook on April 30 are moved to the armory on Concord Heights.
May 2, 1966: Former vice president Richard Nixon lands at Concord Airport for a speech at the Highway Hotel. Of the situation in Vietnam, he says: “We cannot tolerate the administration's apparent resignation to a five to 10-year war in South Vietnam because this will eventually mean an American defeat.”
