■Mrs. Louis Hardy of 380 Chesterfield Road, Northampton, was awarded the Fred Graves bowl from Garden Club president Thomas Yarrows of West Hatfield. This award for the best house plant was judged best of all entries in a house plant exhibit held recently by the Hampshire County Garden Club at the People’s Institute in Northampton.
■If mosquitoes are bugging you, spray them away. The Northampton City Council will be asked Thursday night to approve funding of $670 to purchase a number of 3-gallon spray tanks and approved pesticides to be loaned out to householders who wish to spray their own property to control mosquitoes.
■After 30 years of operation, Carol Butler’s School of Dance, located at 131 King St., is closing this month. Carol Butler Watelet, its owner, says she is not withdrawing from the field of dance altogether. She is going into a semi-retirement to get away from the pressures of running a business.
■Their fundraising more than half complete, the people planning a new playground at the Finn Ryan Road School will soon put it out to bid and will erect two structures this fall, not just one. Last night, organizers of the volunteer effort briefed families on the status of the $50,000 project at a yearly potluck picnic sponsored by the school’s Appreciating Diversity Committee.
■With encounters between black bears and humans increasingly commonplace, and complaints about people feeding bears on the rise, Northampton health officials say it’s time to enact an ordinance that deters those attracting bears with food. “I was shocked there wasn’t any state regulation against feeding the bears,” Northampton Health Director Ben Wood said in a recent interview.
■Pleasant Street Video, where movie lovers and others gathered daily to chew on the issues of the day, will close its doors at the end of July, after 25 years in business. Pleasant Street Video manager and co-owner Dana Gentes said the store’s revenue for the last five years dropped to about half of what it had been in the late 1990s to its mid-2000s heyday.