■Betsey Neugeboren of North Hadley has loaned 27 watercolors for the current art exhibition at Cooley Dickinson Hospital. Many of the paintings were done last year while the artist was living in the south of France. The paintings were done from the balcony of a house where she was living in Speracedes, a country village of 400 people.
■At the annual meeting of stockholders of the First National Bank of Northampton yesterday, Charles D. Stearns and Leon A. Gutfinski were sworn in as directors, bringing the number of active members at present to 11.
■Volunteers across the city — from retirees to teenagers to off-duty police officers — lent special talents to make this year’s Santa for a Day program a success. Now more than 10 years old, the program, overseen by the city’s Recreation Department, buys, wraps and delivers gifts to children from low-income families.
■Despite design revisions, the distraction of protesters at the doors, and the need to dig out from blizzards, the new National Yiddish Book Center is rising from a former apple orchard at Hampshire College, almost on schedule. Located on 10 acres off Route 116, the library and conference center probably will draw up to 40,000 tourists and scholars in its first year, said Aaron Lansky, the Hampshire graduate who founded the center in 1980.
■Easthampton will have a new health inspector when longtime inspector Dennis Lacourse retires in January. The Board of Health chose Jacqueline Duda, the health agent for the Foothills Health District, to serve as the city’s next top health official.
■Mayor-elect David Narkewicz says he plans to appoint Amherst attorney Alan Seewald as city solicitor sometime after he is officially sworn into office Jan. 3. Seewald, who is president of the Amherst-based law firm of Seewald, Jankowski & Spencer, will replace Elaine Reall, who will stay on as Northampton’s labor counsel, Narkewicz said.