March 10, 1964: Absentee candidate Henry Cabot Lodge, U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, wins the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary with 36 percent of the vote. Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller, who have campaigned hard in the state, take 22 and 21 percent respectively, and write-in Richard Nixon, the former vice president, wins 17 percent.
March 11, 1952: Sen. Estes Kefauver’s grass-roots presidential campaign pays off, as he upsets President Truman, who campaigned through surrogates, in the first modern New Hampshire primary. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower easily wins the Republican victory over Sen. Robert O. Taft and two other candidates.
March 11, 1734: Its right to self-government recognized seven years after the first white settlers arrive, Rumford in Essex County, Mass., convenes its first town meeting at 2 p.m. In time the town will be known as Concord, N.H.
March 13, 2003: Gladys Manyan dies at the age of 91. Manyan, known to many as the Monitor’s resident rural columnist, worked for the paper for more than 25 years, reporting news from Franklin, and at the same time, from her own life. In 1966, she began writing “A Domestic View,” a short column that combined recipes with stories of Manyan’s family, her Salisbury farm and her adventures as a country homemaker. That piece of weekly work soon became “Country Woman,” a Monitor feature that won Manyan a slew of loyal fans.
March 13, 1993: People hunker down for what television has hyped as the “storm of the century.” Concord gets 17 inches of snow. Most roads will be clear by morning.
March 14, 2002: The prosecution in the murder trial of Dwayne Thompson, who is accused of killing roommate Robert Provencher, details how Thompson fled to California and requested a new Social Security card, a California non-driver’s identification card and a birth certificate, all under Thompson’s twin brother’s name.
March 14, 1968: Thomas J. Saltmarsh, a 19-year-old paratrooper from Concord, is killed in action near Saigon. He is the 16th local man to die in combat during the Vietnam War.
March 14, 1837: The town of New Chester is renamed Hill, in honor of Gov. Isaac Hill.
March 14, 1968: Motivated by Sen. Eugene McCarthy’s strong showing in the New Hampshire primary two days before, Bobby Kennedy decides that he will run for president.
March 14, 1939: The Monitor reports that the task of renaming city streets has been turned over to the city planning board by an aldermanic committee which has had the job for nine months and renamed just one street.
March 14, 1947: The Monitor editorializes in favor of the construction of a city swimming pool – and a plan to charge swimmers a fee: “It is no more unreasonable to expect swimmers to pay something for this privilege than it is to expect golfers at Beaver Meadow or tennis players at Memorial Field to pay enough to cover the costs of their sport.”
March 15, 2000: A 22-year-old single mother of twins from Franklin is one of the contestants on the new CBS television series Survivor, the Monitor reports. When the show airs this summer, Jenna Lewis will become a household name and a cause celebre throughout her home state.
March 15, 1999: The Monitor reports that Vishay Sprague, one of Concord’s leading manufacturing employers, plans to close its plant on the Heights and move its remaining 2000 jobs to Maine.
March 16, 2003: Gov. Craig Benson’s proposed budget would reduce the prison staff looking after state inmates and shrink funding for education and rehabilitation, despite a growing number of residents behind bars, the Monitor reports. It could also increase crowding at the Concord prison.
March 16, 2001: One year after a proposal to expand Canterbury’s Elkins Library failed by 30 votes, a revised proposal fails by six votes.
March 16, 1982: With a promise to lead the state out of its financial woes, John Sununu becomes the first major candidate this year to announce formally he is running for governor. “The fiscal mess created by Hugh Gallen has made our problems a little bit more difficult and a little bit more complex,” he says.
