A Look Back: May 31

50 Years Ago

■Bernard V. Tobin has resigned from the Northampton School Committee in order to become a candidate for a newly defined position in the school system. Tobin resigned May 11, one day after the committee agreed to fill the new post of assistant to the superintendent. Tobin currently teaches at Gateway Regional School.

■Highest honors at St. Michael’s High School honors night on June 3 will go to David Schmittlein as valedictorian and Rosemary Harvey as salutatorian. Northampton High School Principal John Feeney will be the guest speaker.

25 Years Ago

■A “peace garden” will be created at the Smith Vocational and Agricultural High School to symbolize the May 22 violence that left one student dead from a stab wound and another in a juvenile detention facing a murder charge. Smith Vocational Principal Veronica Carroll said Friday that Gretchen Werle, the school’s nurse, suggested planting such a garden, after a week of helping counsel students aggrieved by a fellow student’s death.

■A longtime member of the Northampton Police Department has been promoted to the rank of lieutenant and will be officer in charge of the department’s patrol division and day shift. Robert H. Dunn Jr., 40, joined the force as an officer in 1982 and worked in the detective bureau for many years.

10 Years Ago

■The Amherst Regional High School locker rooms will be renovated this summer to make them more accessible for transgender students as well as those covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act. The middle school already has changing rooms for students to use based on the gender they identify with.

■The benches are back. After receiving “swift, impassioned and substantial” feedback about his experiment to curb loitering and nuisance behavior downtown by removing a half-dozen public benches on Main Street, Mayor David J. Narkewicz reversed course Thursday morning. He ordered the six benches reinstalled to their previous locations.

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