■Jeffrey Olmsted of Northampton High School has been cited as one of the outstanding high school students of English in the country. The National Council of Teachers of English has named him a 1971 national winner in its annual Achievement Awards competition.
■Some muscle-bound thief or thieves swiped a 300-pound steel ball from the Hadley town garage construction site sometime Wednesday night. When work crews from D.F. Ouimette Construction Co. came on the job at 8 a.m. yesterday, the huge balancing ball which was attached to a crane from Forish Construction Co. of Westfield was gone.
■The Northampton Friends Meeting, after five years of gathering in space on the Smith College campus, bought a house with a 2-acre lot on Barrett Street for $110,000 in September. With the purchase, the Quaker group has committed itself to building its own place for worship, even as members express concerns about their meeting growing too large.
■A flag that once flew over the Capitol building in Washington was raised over the Veterans Monument in Williamsburg yesterday. The flag-raising was symbolic in two ways — as a memorial to all veterans and as part of the renewed effort to recognize them on Veterans Day, a holiday that has been overlooked in recent years in town.
■Voters elected David J. Narkewicz the city’s 44th mayor in a landslide victory Tuesday, defeating candidate Michael R. Bardsley in a contest that pitted two public servants with starkly different perspectives on the state of the city. Narkewicz stunned many political observers by winning all seven of the city’s wards.
■Six years after Northampton voters first approved it by a small margin, they overwhelmingly endorsed the Community Preservation Act, a program that has paid for popular projects such as the restoration of Forbes Library and the preservation of the Bean/Allard farmlands. Northampton voters soundly rejected a referendum to repeal the CPA by a vote of 6,204 to 2,732.