LEBANON — October 2004 was a busy time in the Upper Valley, sometimes joyful, sometimes ominous.
Construction crews were digging away on Route 12A in West Lebanon, clearing ground for a Home Depot that would anchor the southern end of the shopping strip. Just as importantly, the permit for the big-box store included traffic light upgrades that helped ease chronic traffic jams and long waits at red lights.
The Boston Red Sox, led by MVP Manny Ramirez, swept the St. Louis Cardinals to win the team’s first World Series since 1918, erasing the Curse of the Bambino and also letting fans throughout New England know that misery was not, necessarily, to be their fate in life.
And officials in Lebanon were looking for a site to build a new school to replace Lebanon Junior High School, the cramped, 80-year-old facility on Bank Street. It took several votes, but a new middle school eventually opened, eight years later.
The war in Iraq was being felt at home, sometimes in the most painful and tragic of ways for families who lost children in combat. The so-called “war on terror” also came repeatedly to the Upper Valley. Agents from the U.S. Border Patrol regularly ran checkpoints at the rest area along Interstate 91 southbound in Hartford, angering civil libertarians and others who resented being questioned in their cars so far from the Canadian border.
But President George W. Bush also had his supporters, and 800 people packed the Lebanon Opera House in October of that year when First Lady Laura Bush, accompanied by her daughter Jenna and Cindy McCain, paid a campaign visit.
Not everyone in attendance, though, was voting Republican. Lebanon lawyer Patrick Hayes, a city councilor and Democrat, said he was likely to vote for Democrat John Kerry the following month.
“The people here are pretty well committed for Bush, or are people like me, who just like to see famous people,” Hayes said. It was the New Hampshire campaign advantage, or at least it was, before the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the end, Kerry won all the Northeast states, including 3 electoral votes in Vermont and 4 in New Hampshire, where he beat Bush by about 9,000 votes out of some 671,000 cast in the Granite State.
But Bush won a second term overall, winning both the popular vote and the Electoral College, 286-251.
News staff writer John P. Gregg can be reached at jgregg@vnews.com.