A Look Back: Jan. 26

By JIM BRIDGMAN

For the Gazette

Published: 01-26-2023 7:00 AM
50 Years Ago

■Two or three men who apparently “knew what they were doing,” according to one employee of Forbes-Snyder Office Products, flipped an 800-pound safe end over end from the store to railroad tracks 50 yards away, police said late this morning. The still unidentified culprits peeled open the safe with a blunt instrument, taking $700 in cash and checks and numerous company records and files.

■No less than 14 Zayre Department Store shoplifting cases were scheduled for arraignment in Hampshire County District Court this morning. The complaints, all from November and December 1972, were grouped together for the convenience of Zayre security officials.

25 Years Ago

■First Night ’98 brought a record profit to the Northampton Center for the Arts, which organizes the yearly downtown bash on Dec. 31. Sales of admission buttons and donations to the event reached record levels, and the annual grant the city gives was also up, said Marjorie Spillman, the event’s director. In all, $101,236 came in.

■A pilot program will bring Northampton High School students together for the first time with Smith Vocational and Agricultural High School machine shop teachers. Machine department teachers from the vocational school will offer an introductory computer-aided design class to students from the other Northampton high school, starting this week.

10 Years Ago

■Superintendent Brian Salzer said Friday that asking Northampton High School students to write a pledge to aid the police investigation of an anonymous threat was wrong. “This was not our way of doing business, not our protocol,” Salzer said. “I believe had we had more heads together, we would not have gone forward with this.”

■Rose Olver, emeritus professor of psychology and women’s and gender studies, was honored with the unveiling of her portrait in Johnson Chapel at Amherst College on Tuesday. As Amherst College’s first tenure-track female faculty member, Olver arrived on campus more than a decade before the school became a co-educational institution.

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