A Look Back, March 17

50 Years Ago

■Pulaski Park will receive a face lifting under a $15,000 matching funds grant from the Massachusetts Bicentennial Commission. Plans for the project include moving the Pulaski Memorial closer to Main Street, providing rest areas with new plantings and benches, improving circulation through the park and establishing a large, paved activities area adjacent to the Academy of Music.

■Judge Luke F. Ryan will preside over the activities of the Northampton delegation to the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Holyoke. Ryan, who will serve as grand marshal, has presided over the Hampshire County District Court for the past four years, and was Northampton’s mayor from 1951 to 1953.

25 Years Ago

■A worker-owned copy shop in Amherst is preparing to open a satellite business in Florence. Collective Copies, a 17-year-old workers’ cooperative, plans to open the full-service copy shop April 8. That date will mark the 158th anniversary of the founding of a worker-owned enterprise and community known as the Northampton Association of Business and Industry, one of Florence village’s claims to historical fame.

■A coalition of mostly teachers and students gathered at the Frontier Regional School Wednesday to call for an alternative to the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System tests, which they said are an arbitrary and mean-spirited yardstick for measuring schools and students’ abilities.

10 Years Ago

■Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day parade made history Sunday as two gay and lesbian groups marched after decades of opposition that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The gay military veterans service group OutVets and gay rights group Boston Pride joined the annual celebration of military veterans and Irish heritage at the invitation of the sponsoring south Boston Allied War Veterans Council.

■Cooley Dickinson Hospital physician Dr. William J. Swiggard, of Hatfield, has been honored by the Hampshire District Medical Society as the 2015 Community Clinician of the Year, an award recognizing his professionalism and contributions. Certified in internal medicine with a subspecialty in infectious diseases, Swiggard has been a staff physician at Cooley Dickinson since 2003.