■Amherst Town Meeting last night overwhelmingly gave its support to locating the John F. Kennedy Library on the University of Massachusetts campus at Amherst. Voting on a motion submitted by Chair of the Selectboard Nancy Eddy, Town Meeting voted 180 to 28 to endorse locating the library on the UMass campus.
■The Academically Talented (AT) program in the Northampton school system barely missed being scrapped last night when the Northampton School Committee voted 5 to 4 to defeat a motion to drop the program after the students presently enrolled in it finish. The surprise move to delete the AT program came from school board member Deborah Weeks.
■Six Flags New England theme park, formerly Riverside Amusement Park, opened with fireworks, balloons, and confetti at noon yesterday, and hundreds of invited guests of all ages rushed to catch the first ride on the newest attraction, “Superman Ride of Steel,” a roller coaster with a drop of 221 feet, and speeds over 70 miles per hour.
■After 86 years, Kollmorgen Corp.’s days as an independent company appear to be almost over. Kollmorgen’s board of directors has agreed to sell the firm, whose Electro-Optical Division employees 230 people in Northampton and Brattleboro, Vt., to the Danaher Corp. of Washington, D.C.
■Northampton will march to its own drummer when it comes to financing city elections after the City Council Thursday approved a measure that limits the maximum amount individuals may donate to a candidate to $500. That is a departure from the limit of $1,000 that was adopted last year by the state.
■Dirt will finally start flying in a planned $2.475 million Pulaski Park renovation long championed by Mayor David J. Narkewicz now that the City Council on Thursday night approved the Community Preservation Act funding for the first phase of the project.