■Associate Commissioner of the State Department of Public Works, Charles A. Bisbee Jr. of Chesterfield, will leave the state DPW in January to assume his new duties as superintendent of the Holyoke Soldiers’ Home on Feb. 1. Bisbee will replace John P. Harrington who retires in January after 15 years.
■Everett W. Ladd, vice president of the Northampton National Bank, is to be elected president at the February bank organizational meeting, and President Richard S. Holden will become chairman of the board. Ladd joined the bank in 1963 as an assistant cashier, coming from the Federal Land Bank-Production Credit System.
■The Yiddish National Book Center has gotten a big boost toward its goal of raising $6.3 million to build a library, museum and educational complex at Hampshire College with a gift of $250,000 from the profits of the Academy Award-winning film “Schindler’s List.”
■A committee working to erect a statue of Sojourner Truth in Florence is moving ahead with gusto. The committee began in earnest at Thanksgiving with an ambitious drive to raise the $200,000 needed to commission, create and install the monument, according to Andrea Ayvazian of Northampton.
■A neighborhood that banded together in the aftermath of last year’s arson fires stood in solidarity again Monday night, remembering a father and son who lost their lives a years ago in a tragic Fair Street blaze. The ceremony of silence at Lampron Park off Bridge Street, which lasted nearly an hour, drew about 100 residents.
■A dog that is part of the University of Massachusetts police force now has as much protection as the officer who handles him. Diezel, a Dutch shepherd from Belgium, was recently outfitted with a bulletproof and stab-resistant vest after the department received a donation from a Taunton couple.