50 Years Ago

■A Cessna 150 airplane crashed yesterday morning while practicing take-offs and landings at LaFleur airport, causing substantial damage to the plane but no injury to the pilot. Laurent LaFleur of the airport said this morning that the plane veered to the left on one of the take-offs, and started “bouncing on its nose wheel, then bouncing on its nose, and then turned over on its back.”

■Faculty salaries at the University of Massachusetts, which were slightly below the national average in 1963, have more than doubled in the past decade and now stand almost $4,000 above the national norm. Last fall, the average salary for the 1,294 full-time faculty here reached $18,369, an all-time high.

25 Years Ago

■After nine years with the Northampton Police Department, Preston P. Horton, well-known both for patrolling by bicycle and being the first city officer to say publicly he is gay, will take a new job in Boston. Horton, 30, will start as an officer with the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority June 1.

■“Art in the Gym,” an installation of eight larger-than-life wooden figures of athletes in motion, has been installed in the Northampton High School gym during the April school vacation. The artist, Lydia Nettler, created the nine-foot-tall painted figures and their shadow figures, which have been mounted high in the gym.

10 Years Ago

■A group calling itself Justice for Jonas is calling on the Northampton Police Department to drop a civil infraction against an Amherst man stemming from a March arrest that was recorded and widely distributed. “The force used . . . was unethical, harmful, but above all, extremely unnecessary,” Camilla Carpio, a junior at Amherst Regional High School and member of the coalition, said before the City Council Thursday.

■Arianna Huffington, president and editor-in-chief of the news website that bears her name, challenged Smith College graduates Sunday to redefine the meaning of success and lead what she called “the third women’s revolution.” In her commencement address, Huffington said society’s model of success — in which success, money and power have practically become synonymous — is badly broken.

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