■Both Mrs. Rose Lander of 59 Dryads Green and her 9-year-old daughter, Shira, brushed up on their violin work at a workshop in Lansdale, Pa., this past summer. Mrs. Lander, the wife of Rabbi Yechiael Lander, associate chaplain of Smith College, is a private violin teacher and an instructor of violin at Northampton’s Vernon Street School.
■Gov. Francis W. Sargent filed a capital outlay budget request Friday which included $1 million for the purchase of the Northampton School for Girls for use as a mental health and retardation center. Local mental health officials view the action as a step in the right direction.
■Jews, Protestants, Catholics, Buddhists and Muslims from up and down the Valley packed a city church yesterday to celebrate through song, chant, prayer and speech a shared belief in universal justice, mercy and the unity of all people. Sixteen congregations were represented in the interfaith worship service organized by the Committee to Stop Church Burnings and Racism, a subcommittee of the Committee for Northampton.
■If an auditorium filled with more that 2,000 people can feel like a living room, the John M. Greene Hall at Smith College did last night. The audience came to hear Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates Jr., professors at Harvard University who together wrote the newly published book “The Future of the Race.”
■With simple and solemn ceremony, the United States will mark the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks tomorrow with prayer and remembrances and a naming of those who died at the sites where thousands perished one decade ago. Americans of every stripe, from presidents to firefighters to average citizens, will pause to honor the dead in churches, at the sites of the attacks, and in living rooms across the country.
■Crews from a Northampton firm will be swinging hammers in the national television spotlight, as they begin building a new home today for the family of Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover of Springfield, who committed suicide in 2009 at age 11. Construct Associates Inc. will join an army of designer, builders and community volunteers in erecting a new home for Walker-Hoover’s family under the watchful cameras of ABC’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.”