Often, it is only with the perspective of hindsight that we can assess what is lastingly important, and which seemed so at the time, but ended up being only a flash-in-the-pan. With this in mind, we thought it would be instructive to take a look at Town Meeting 50 years ago, hoping it would lend us new insight for the one upcoming in April and May, 1999 (current warrant articles here).

We consulted the Concord Journal and found the reporting was, well, scanty. Of course, the paper was much smaller then than it is now, but it is obvious that the coverage we get now is more voluminous than it was in 1949. The piece on the meeting was on the front page's far-left column running only half-way down the sheet, continuing for part of a column on a back page, and...that was all. Unfortunately, there is so much more we want to know than can be answered by such a short report.

The meeting covered issues both mundane and unusual. The outcomes ranged from ho-hum to surprising -- even theatrical (as can be seen below). This is not odd, as Town Meeting is always a combination of dull rhetoric and great performance art rolled together in a unique blend.

In 1949, the Town Clerk was an elective office, and the salary allotted was $2343. The Town Treasurer and Collector were also elected offices and $1464.10 and $2395.90 respectively were the salaries approved for these positions. The Chair of the Board of Selectmen made $250; the Clerk of the BOS $150; each additional selectman $100. There was an article asking for $10,300 for street lighting. Another asked for rezoning of the area northwest of Baker Avenue (eventually defeated).

Nineteen-fifty was to be the 175th anniversary of the Concord Fight, just as 2000 will be its 225th. At the meeting, a committee of three was appointed to create a committee of 25 to plan the celebration.

On several occasions during that meeting, something happened which -- again by our current standards -- seems unusual: significantly greater monies were voted to be approrpriated than were originally requested. In these days of Proposition 2-1/2 budget crunches, to read that the meeting approved sometimes three times more than was requested seems surreal.

The big issue which resulted in a real surprise was funding for school buildings. This is of particular interest to us as this closely echoes our own time, with the school budget under contest this year and an upcoming request for a multi-million dollar capital expense to rebuild our sagging schools (though this will not be on this April's docket).

A special Town Meeting in 1948 voted to purchase land and prepare plans to build two new schools: one in Concord center, the other in West Concord. The 1949 TM was the next step, and the warrant articles asked for $350,000 and $175,000 for these projects respectively. At the town meeting, those gathered voted down the projects, rejecting even the request for monies to complete the plans. The committee presenting these plans were left"gasping" by this outcome.

What followed was interesting, too: a resident's request for the meeting to reconsider the vote, a long discussion about the legality of that request, and what must have been a decision to do so. The next vote produced a more clear statement: 377 for, 420 against, and still many abstentions. Later at the same meeting, the West Concord school was voted down 276 to 392; there seemed to have been many abstentions here, too.

We'd love to hear from anyone who remembers this Town Meeting and can fill us in on the missing details. Email us, please.