■Seven to nine inches of what was, until the last minute, a totally unexpected snowstorm left hundreds of thousands of Pioneer Valley would-be Easter Sunday strollers and tens of thousands of Easter Sunday motorists mumbling bitterly over when this long winter would end.
■Mrs. Margery Cornwall has completed a course of training preparing her for the position of Northampton’s welcome wagon hostess. Mrs. Cornwall lives in Easthampton and is one of 6,000 Welcome Wagon hostesses who make more than a million calls annually on families throughout the world.
■The need to cap escalating overtime costs may force Northampton Fire Department officials to make a decision they dread: Deplete the ranks at the Florence Fire Station or use only two of three available trucks downtown.
■Appearing at the University of Massachusetts – a campus that has struggled to heal tensions between black and Jewish students – two authors, teachers and humanitarians offered a powerful example of what the two communities hold in common. Maya Angelou and Elie Wiesel received a standing ovation from an estimated crowd of 6,000 at the Mullins Center last night.
■Students at the Conway School of Landscape Design have developed several proposals for the Bean and Allard property off Spring Street in Florence that the city of Northampton plans to turn into a mixed-use parcel featuring farmland, recreation fields, and conservation land.
■Construction is well under way on the new Kollmorgen Electro-Optical Corp. building at the top of Village Hill, on the south side of Route 66. When it’s completed, nearly 400 employees will work in the 140-000-square-foot structure. Traffic signals are already in place to accommodate the expected increase in traffic.