NORTHAMPTON — Two newsroom staff members at the Daily Hampshire Gazette recently won awards from the New England Newspaper & Press Association in its 2022 New England Better Newspaper Competition.

Photographer Carol Lollis won a third-place award in the general news photo category for a photo of raptor rehabilitator Tom Ricardi releasing a hawk that he had helped to free from the bell tower of the St. John Cantius Church in Northampton.

The photo ran with a story headlined “Saved from the bell tower” on June 23.

And arts writer Steve Pfarrer took second place in the human interest feature story category for “Catalog of complaints,” his lighthearted examination of Depression-era letters of complaint to the Montgomery Ward mail order business. Montague resident Evan H. Gregg had compiled the letters into a book, “Dear Mister Ward,” from which he also presented a staged reading at the Shea Theater in Turners Falls.

The letters had been saved by Gregg’s late grandmother Verna Gregg, who had worked from 1932 10 1942 in the complaints department of Montgomery Ward at its  headquarters in St. Paul, Minnesota and responded to all the letters, mostly from customers in the upper Midwest and northern Plains.

She later retyped them, complete with spelling mistakes and crossed-over characters from the originals.

As the story suggests, it could get lonely out on the prairie, and “customers in isolated communities likely had a genuine desire to connect with the company, one whose products had a big impact on their lives.”

The letters offer a window on a gentler time, such as the one from a farmer letting the company know it had sent him the wrong item: “I ordered a 32 [volt] electric churn and what do I get — a lawn mower. Now what can a fellow with a lot of cream do with a lawn mower?”

The awards were presented Saturday in Waltham.

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