A Look Back: Dec. 24

50 Years Ago

• After half a century of doing business in Easthampton, the W. T. Grant store on Union Street will close its doors Saturday, a victim of the corporate insolvency of the Grant retail chain. Eleven full-time employees at the store here will be out of work.
• Northampton’s roads remained covered with hard-packed snow and ice today, while roads in most other Hampshire County communities are already cleaned. City Department of Public Works head Francis Ryan said that one reason for the situation is that the city used no salt on the roads after the first 6-inch snowfall last Saturday because of “constant requests by conservationists and environmentalists.”

25 Years Ago

• The Northampton Fire Department is one of 1,243 fire departments in the U.S., Canada, Iceland and Puerto Rico to receive an award for preventing deaths in residential fires last year. The department received the Life Safety Achievement Award this fall from the Residential Fire Safety Institute, a public interest group that works to reduce residential fire deaths and injuries.
• Looking ahead to the coming legislative session, Sen. Stanley C. Rosenberg sees some particularly tough challenges. Obvious tasks will be implementing the $1.4 billion income tax cut – “the 500-pound gorilla” – and the second phase of education reform. Less obvious is the challenge lawmakers face adjusting to so-called Clean Elections, the campaign finance reform plan enacted by referendum in 1998.

10 Years Ago

• In a morning of collective reflection Wednesday, Northampton’s current and former mayors gathered at the Senior Center for a rollicking and wide-ranging conversation broadcast live by radio station WHMP, spanning nearly four decades of the city’s history. It was a very Northampton affair – talk of affordable housing, tax overrides, Village Hill development, and gender equality.
• The former location of Zoe’s Fish House may see design firm Brigade from down Route 9 take its place. John Regish, owner of 195 Russell St., where Zoe’s most recently operated, said the firm was aiming to move in either Feb. 1 or March 1.

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