■Northampton’s Three County Fair, to begin Labor Day weekend, will feature an art which has remained highly popular since first devised 47 years ago. The featured thrill show will be Buddy Wagner’s Lucky Hell Drivers, considered by fans to be among the top in the nation.
■The Amherst Post Office today is overflowing with applications for the commemorative Emily Dickinson stamp to be issued Aug. 28. An estimated 200,000 applications from all over the world are piled in about 35 cartons at the main North Pleasant Street branch, and close to a thousand more are pouring in daily.
■A substantial chunk of downtown real estate passed yesterday out of the hands of the family that bought it 43 years ago. George M. Childs and his wife, Bernice A. Childs, sold the property at 23-25 State St. to a Northampton-based corporation called State Street Twenty-Five Inc.
■Former Easthampton resident and 1983 Easthampton High School graduate Kathleen McCully won five gold medals at the United States Lifeguard Association’s National Championships held in Daytona, Fla., last weekend. McCully, who has been lifeguarding since 1985, is currently a teacher and swim coach at Nauset Regional High School in Orleans.
■A team mapping invasive species on a special Hadley tract didn’t need its hand-held computers to gauge the density of the multiflora rose. The plant grows so rampantly it stopped field workers in their tracks Thursday. “This is the worst we’ve ever mapped,” Dillon Harker, a team member, said of the site.
■The Northampton City Council delivered another strong message in support of civil rights Thursday by unanimously approving a resolution that condemns a controversial federal immigration law enforcement program known as Secure Communities. The resolution calls for city employees and police to shun participation in the program by the U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement agency.