– Dec. 14, 1955: A train conductor uncoupling an engine from the freight train in Concord gets his foot caught between the rail and guard rail and is then run over by the train and crushed to death, the Coos Republican reports.
– Dec. 15, 1987: Just before noontime, Gary Hart and his wife Lee stroll onto the State House Plaza, where the media horde waits. After having dropped out in May because of highly publicized womanizing, Hart announces that he is back in the Democratic race for president. “I have the power of ideas,” he says, “and I can govern this country.”
– Dec. 15, 1836: The Legislature votes to accept an $892,115 grant from Washington – but only after chiding the federal government for “degrading the states and reducing them to servile dependence.” The money will be pvied up among the towns.
– Dec. 16, 1965: A new state report shows public libraries in New Hampshire spend an average of $2.32 per resident. Concord tops the list at $4.06 per resident. Book readership is also up statewide, to 6.71 books per resident per year.
– Dec. 17, 1951: The temperature in Concord falls to 22 below zero, making this the coldest December day of the 20th century.
– Dec. 17, 1828: Ralph Waldo Emerson, who is under serious consideration for the job of assistant pastor to the Second Church in Boston (the Mathers’ church), visits Concord. He and Ellen Tucker, whom he met the previous Christmas, become engaged to marry. He is 25, she 17.
– Dec. 17, 1808: Three years after a state prison is proposed in Concord, the Legislature authorizes a committee of three to accept bids for building one. It will be nearly four years before the prison opens on North States Street at Tremont Street. It will be a three-story, 36-cell structure surrounded by granite walls three feet thick and 14 feet high. The cost: $37,000.
– Dec. 17, 1992: Gov. Judd Gregg orders a pagan symbol removed from the State House lawn. The young man who erected it goes to court, where Steven McAuliffe, in his first major decision as a federal judge, overrules Gregg’s order.]
– Dec. 18, 1995: Concord’s Bob Tewksbury signs a one-year contract with the San Diego Padres for $1.5 million.
– Dec. 19, 1979: At a campaign stop in Concord, Senate Minority Leader Howard Baker says a get-tough policy is needed to protect American embassies and suggests the creation of a special 50,000-member military unit to accomplish that. “As dangerous as the situation is in Iran, the real danger to this country is the growing impression throughout the world that you can push on Uncle Sam and nothing ever happens in return,” he says.
– Dec. 20, 1979: U.S. Rep. John Anderson, a Republican from Illinois, comes to Concord to officially register for the GOP presidential primary. Ronald Reagan, he tells the Associated Press, “is a long way from being home free in this race.”
