A Look Back, Dec. 30

50 Years Ago

■Gerald Newell has sold the Vermont Store on Main Street to Neil A. Soutra, owner of Dwyers’ Florists, located two doors down from the Vermont Store, and his wife, Marion. The sale marks the end of 31 years on Main Street for Newell, one of the city’s most colorful businessmen. Newell will now open a printing shop at 1 Amber Lane (named for his cat) behind the north side of Main Street.

■Maurice J. Carlson, whose men’s clothing store has been a fixture on Main Street for 41 years, has announced that he is retiring. Carlson said that he has sold his store to Ferdinand Kochapski, who has been his manager for over 20 years.

25 Years Ago

■Northampton Cooperative Bank this week hired two armed off-duty police officers to watch its office lobbies in Northampton and Amherst. The purpose, bank president William Stapleton explained, was to give comfort to customers who might have decided to make larger-than-usual withdrawals as a hedge against the millennium computer bug, come Saturday.

■Calling it his homecoming, a Westhampton entrepreneur has bought the long-established Agway farm and garden store on King Street where he started working as a management trainee in 1971 and later managed for Agway Inc. Francis E. Hartnett says he plans to greatly expand the volume and variety of goods sold there and will immediately begin work to double the size of the retail showroom.

10 Years Ago

■With years of planning, construction and preparations leading to this day, a collection of eager passengers braced the cold Monday at Union Station to wait for the first passenger train to and from Northampton in decades. On the platform and beyond, many people expressed interest in commuter service with multiple trains traveling north and south through Massachusetts.

■There was little fanfare, no ceremonial “big switch” to throw and the lights didn’t even flicker as the 620-megawatt Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant shut down Monday afternoon. It was a slow, quiet process that took about three hours to bring the 1972 boiling water reactor offline.