Also on today’s menu:
Man Drowns In Berry Pond
Assisting Lincoln — Or Not
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center’s Department of Neurology and Section of Neurosurgery, in a partnership with Yale School of Medicine and the Mayo Clinic, are pioneering a procedure they are calling the Stimulation of the Thalamus for Arousal Restoral in Temporal lobe epilepsy (START) in which they implant neurostimulator devices targeting four specific areas of the brain in order to control the condition.
Jessica Sargent, a 34-year-old mother from Barrington, became the first START clinical trial participant nationwide on February 21.
Participants undergoing the procedure receive an Epilepsy Personal Assistant Device tablet to track seizures and epilepsy medications, as well as an Automatic Responsiveness Testing in Epilepsy smartwatch, which asks the participant questions during a seizure to see if they are can respond and determine if the neurostimulator is successfully preventing loss of consciousness.
Man Drowns In Berry Pond
A 70-year-old Moultonborough man died and another man escaped after a truck crashed through the ice on Berry Pond on Sunday morning as they were inspecting the surface in preparation for ice racing. The victim, John “Jack” Cook, was an avid auto racer and organizer for the Lakes Region Ice Racing Club for more than 40 of his 70 years, and was instrumental in the club’s founding.
The Lakes Region Ice Racing Club holds races on ponds in Moultonborough as conditions permit.
Although there was more than a foot of ice on the pond, varying temperatures recently had created a “soft spot,” according to Sergeant Alex Lopshanski of the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department.
Assisting Lincoln — Or Not
In speaking on behalf of the volunteers seeking to build a veterans’ monument that would include the names of all Meredith residents who served in the nation’s wars, Fred Strader invoked the name of Major E.E. Bedee, who had donated the Civil War statue that stands by the town library.
Bedee is reputed to have held Abraham Lincoln’s head after the president was shot by John Wilkes Booth in Ford’s Theater. The late Bristol historian Charles E. Greenwood recounted that story in an article, “He Saw Lincoln Shot: The story of an obscure captain in the Union Army who was both a witness to and a part of a historic tragedy.”
A Fremont historian doubted that account, writing, “I think some of which has been written about Bedee has been exaggerated to some degree by Bedee himself. Everyone seemed to claim at the time they were in Ford’s Theater the night of the assassination — people in those days were really caught up in their own self-importance and frequently blew themselves up bigger than they were, simply because many considered you a nobody if you weren’t in the upper class of society at that time.”
Bedee would have been particularly tempted to exaggerate his role: He was born Edwin Elzaphan Beede, the son of an unmarried woman and an unknown father, and he changed the spelling of his last name in an effort to avoid being identified as illegitimate. On the other hand, he distinguished himself in the War Between the States and became a wealthy man after the war, so such a fabrication would not have been necessary to establish his social position.
From Our Readers
Excellent article on the history of the Will and music room in today’s Sun. It brought to mind prior discussions that I hadn’t thought of in a few years. If the warrant article should pass and this building torn down, how does that impact the provisions of the prior bequest to the town? …
A giant “AMEN” to today’s column! Why on earth did the Select Board decide in this particular year to make such huge deposits to these accounts when there were such massive increases in the budget and warrant articles?
— Susan Duncan
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A Sugar Hill visitor last night. I heard very canine-sounding howling during the night. Perhaps a coyote?