■“The first of her sex in Northampton to become a school traffic officer,” says Police Chief James Whalen about Mrs. James Tobin, mother of seven. Mrs. Tobin now directs children across the four-corner interchange at Maple and Main street in Florence. “It may take people a while to get used to having a woman at that corner,” says Whalen.
■Samuel D. Lockshin of Northampton was the recent recipient of U.S. patent No. 3,512,834, entitled, “Method and Means for Securing the Ends of the Webbings Material to the Frame of Garden or Porch Furniture.” Lockshin has assigned this patent to Shott Chairs Corp., Hamilton, Ohio.
■The longtime sponsor of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Boston should have been allowed to exclude a group of gays and lesbians from participating, the Supreme Court ruled today. The unanimous decision said state court rulings in 1992 and 1993 that forced the parade’s sponsor to include the homosexual group violated the sponsoring group’s free-speech rights.
■About 35 customers and 30 staff had to leave the Serv-U Hardware Homecenter on King Street Saturday after an anonymous caller, said to be a middle-aged man with slurred speech, called to announce a bomb would go off in 10 minutes. A 20-minute search of the aisles by police, fire officials and store supervisors turned up nothing unusual.
■Long revered for its natural beauty the Mount Tom Range is one of the Valley’s defining features. But the mountain’s rocky outcroppings are undergoing an unsightly, man-made change. Brightly colored graffiti is proliferating along the ridgeline, just south of the Metacomet and Monadnock Trail, now part of the federally designated National New England Scenic Trail.
■University of Massachusetts professors hope a new smartphone application they’ve created will give regular people the tools to help clean up the oil-soaked Gulf coast. Relying on everyday technology, the app known as MoGo, which is short for Mobile Gulf Observatory, allows people to photograph wildlife in need of help and summon experts to its precise location.