A Look Back, March 10

50 Years Ago

■For 21 years — longer than anyone else in Easthampton’s history — Stanley Pacocha has served on the board of selectmen. Today, at 59, he is retiring. Pacocha has served on the board during the period of the town’s most explosive growth.

■The steady upward spiral of food prices seems to have reached a plateau, and may even be dropping slightly, managers of local grocery stores say. Nationwide, The Wall Street Journal reported today that food prices have begun to slowly turn back, after rising 15 percent last year and 14.5 percent the year before.

25 Years Ago

■Northampton officials are exploring the possibility of putting a telephone communications tower at the city’s Glendale Road landfill, rather than see it be placed at a site off Ryan Road that had neighbors fretting.

■As library shelves in the Five College area are crammed to capacity with an ever-increasing collection, an underground bunker will provide a precious commodity space. A $1.1 million grant to Five Colleges Inc. will bring volumes from all five area campuses to the former Air Force bunker under the Mount Holyoke Range.

10 Years Ago

■It worked. Months of preparation, a call out to police from about a dozen departments and a concert with world-class artists helped University of Massachusetts Amherst officials keep a lid on Blarney Blowout. By 5 p.m. Saturday, police reported only six arrests — a far cry from the 55 that had accumulated by that time last year.

■What does it cost to keep 22,000 students under control? On the weekend of Blarney Blowout, the University of Massachusetts managed it for about $500,000. Of that total, $305,000 went to pay artists Juicy J, Kesha and Ludacris at a Mullins Center concert attended by 5,200 students, who received free tickets from the university.