Haydenville bank branch future unclear after merger

By OWEN BOSS

Staff Writer

WILLIAMSBURG - The future of the Legacy Bank branch office on Main Road is unclear, following the bank's announcement it plans to merge with Berkshire Bank.

On Dec. 22, the two companies signed a definitive merger agreement stating that Berkshire Bank plans to acquire Legacy Bancorp Inc. and its subsidiary, Legacy Banks, in a transaction valued at approximately $108 million.

On Friday, Laurie Gazzillo, spokeswoman for Legacy Bank, said that officials with both banks are still working toward getting paperwork approved before changes can be made.

"We just announced the agreement to merge so there is still a lot of regulatory filing that has to occur before anything can be officially approved," Gazzillo said. "That is why we have no information about any individual branch offices at this time."

The next step in the process, she said, will be gaining the Department of Justice's stamp of approval on the applications they have submitted. A ruling could be months away.

According to a press release issued by Gazzillo, the merger of Legacy into Berkshire would create a combined institution with about $4 billion in assets. Both banks, she said, have branch offices located across western Massachusetts and northeastern New York.

Legacy has nearly $1 billion in assets and 19 branches; Berkshire, which is also working to acquire the New York-based Rome Savings Bank, has nearly $3 billion in assets and will have 47 branches when the pending transaction with Rome Bancorp. is complete.

"Legacy and Berkshire have been friendly competitors over the years and now we're joining the Berkshire team to create a larger combined platform to serve our traditional and target markets," J. Williar Dunlaevy, Legacy bank's president and CEO, said in a statement.

Echoing Dunlaevy's optimism was Berkshire Bank President and CEO Michael P. Daly, who laid out the bank's planned expansion over the next 12 months. "We expect to complete our pending our pending merger with Rome Bancorp in the first quarter of 2011 and to complete the Legacy merger in the following quarter."

Owen Boss can be reached at oboss@gazettenet.com.

Easthampton Chamber Celebrates 50 years, honoring 17 members

By OWEN BOSS

Staff Writer

HOLYOKE - At the celebration of its 50th anniversary Thursday night, the Greater Easthampton Chamber of Commerce took a moment to look back at how far it has come since its inception and honor its 17 founding members.

The Chamber's annual celebration drew a crowd of more than 100 area residents to the Delaney House and featured addresses from a handful of local and state legislators, including state Sen. Michael R. Knapik, R-Westfield; state Rep. John W. Scibak, D-South Hadley; and Mayor Michael Tautznik.

Before dinner, guests looked over a display spread on a table in the main conference room, featuring photos, newspaper clippings and assorted memorabilia that harked back to the Chamber's founding in 1961.

The theme of the evening, it seemed, was noting the vast changes that have taken place in Easthampton over the last 50 years, the many businesses that have come and gone and those that continue to flourish to this day.

As the evening's first speaker, former Chamber president and longtime board member Chuck Connor, brought those in attendance back to 1960, when local business owners looked to establish a Businessmen's Association, which soon after became the city's first Business and Professional Men's Association.

"Tonight isn't just about kicking off the next 50 years of the Chamber, but to honor our Chamber's charter members for their 50 years of membership, their successes and their continued support of the Greater Easthampton business community," said the organization's executive director, Eric Snyder.

Although Knapik too noted that the business landscape in Western Massachusetts has changed dramatically in the 50 years since the Chamber was formed, he pointed out that it has been the willingness of area business owners to take risks that has helped the city's business community to thrive.

"There are many pioneers here in Easthampton who have been integral to this Chamber but more importantly this community," Knapik said. "Easthampton has positioned itself in a much different way than many communities have, and I think Easthampton is in a place that is very good for its future."

Scibak echoed Knapik's optimism for the future, attributing the Chamber's lasting success to the city's diversity, both in its business offerings and its residents.

"It is the diversity in terms of what the local business community offers and the diversity and the involvement of the people who are sitting right here in this room," Scibak said.

Also speaking Thursday was Mayor Michael Tautznik, who marked the occasion by offering Chamber President Susan Lapointe with a golden key to the city. "Together we will all move forward," Tautznik said. "This is to recognize our outstanding business members on our Chamber's 50th anniversary ... I present this symbolic gold key as a sign of the future and in the hope that it will unlock the door to continued success and prosperity."

The Chamber's 17 charter members, each of which received a commemorative plaque, were the Banas & Fickert Insurance Agency, Big E's Supermarket, Boulanger Plumber & Heating, Cernak Fuel Corp., Daily Hampshire Gazette, DeGrandpre Jewelers, Easthampton Feed, Easthampton Savings Bank, Finck & Perras Insurance Agency, Landry Furniture Company, O'Brien Funeral Home, The October Co., Stevens Urethane, Strong Bus Corp., Western Massachusetts Electric Co., WHMP radio and the Williston Northampton School.

Owen Boss can be reached at oboss@gazettenet.com.

Longtime coach, girls sports advocate Agnes 'Gush' Valenta dies at 77

By OWEN BOSS

Staff Writer

NORTHAMPTON - Agnes A. "Gush" Valenta, a lifelong Hampshire County resident well known for promoting girls sports in an era when opportunities for female athletes were scarce, died late Tuesday night at age 77.

Her name, now memorialized on a city softball field, has become synonymous with women's and girls sports in western Massachusetts, especially the Northampton Lassie League, which she cofounded in 1969.

Born on the Fourth of July in 1933, Valenta was a 1952 graduate of Northampton High School, coached the Blue Devils girls basketball and softball teams and for more than 20 years worked for the city's Recreation Department.

Valenta, who most recently lived on Grove Street in Haydenville, spent her childhood in Northampton and devoted 55 years of her life to promoting various women's sports leagues in cities across western Massachusetts.

Her tireless efforts did not go unrecognized, and she was the proud recipient of numerous awards: In 1988 the Professional Women of Hampshire County named Valenta their choice for Woman of the Year; in 2007 she received Boston College's Heights Award for forwarding women's sports; and in 2003 she was inducted into the New England Women's Sports Hall of Fame.

Despite her many accolades, in 2005 Valenta told a Gazette reporter that the "highlight of her life" came on a brisk fall afternoon in 1985, when city and state officials came together to honor her and rename the city's Lassie League Field near the Three-County Fairgrounds "Agnes 'Gush' Valenta Lassie League Park."

"When the city named the field after me, that was the highlight of my life. I had no idea. I was retiring and they gave me a city employees' party in the back room and sent invitations and told people to just drop in and say goodbye to Gush, but they wanted to do something else," Valenta said in 2005. "They couldn't do it at a restaurant because they felt there wasn't any place that would be big enough, so they decided to do it up at Look Park Pavilion. It was perfect because we had hot dogs and hamburgers and it was a lot of fun. It was great how many of my Lassie Leaguers and coaches came back. It was unbelievable."

Valenta, whose seldom-used given name Agnes was dropped early on in her life in favor of its Polish shorthand, grew up with an affinity for basketball, softball and field hockey in an era when there were few athletic opportunities available to young women.

Her life spent promoting girls and women's sports began soon after her high school graduation, when a few girls in her neighborhood expressed interest in playing basketball after high school. There were no basketball teams in town for young women.

By day, Valenta worked as an accountant for Pioneer Valley Ginger Ale, the soda pop company that once bottled Pepsi in downtown Florence, and on nights and weekends she worked to establish the Gazette Girls semi-pro basketball team.

Valenta spent about a dozen years organizing the team's annual road trips to Maine, New Hampshire and Rhode Island and one year took the team on a goodwill trip to Bermuda.

Although her career began with the Gazette Girls, Valenta is better known locally for bringing the Lassie League, a youth softball league, to Northampton.

Soon after it was introduced, the local league was a huge hit. Though Lassie League, which involves girls from childhood through late teens, was offered in cities across the commonwealth, the Northampton league was recognized as being among the most successful statewide.

Ray Ellerbrook, who served alongside Valenta on the city's Recreation Department from 1976 until her retirement in 1996, visited her at the Linda Manor Extended Care Facility in Northampton earlier this week.

Ellerbrook described Valenta as "a woman before her time" and said the formation of the city's Lassie League was the effort that was always "nearest and dearest to her heart."

"When Gush set her mind to doing something, she would see it through and nothing could stop her," Ellerbrook said. "She had tons of friends and tons of supporters, and she didn't think twice about calling on them to help her out if it meant forwarding something for the girls in the community."

Ellerbrook said he has organized a celebration of Valenta's life, to be held at the Garden House at Look Park immediately following the burial of her ashes on Monday.

"The celebration will be open to anyone who would like to stop by and talk about Gush and what she meant to this community," Ellerbrook said. "She was the one who started everything when it came to women's sports in Northampton."

Services

A memorial Mass will be held at 10 a.m. Monday, Jan. 31, at Our Lady of the Hills Church in Haydenville. Immediately following the service, Valenta's ashes will be buried in St. Mary's Cemetery in Leeds. There are no calling hours.

Donations in her memory may be made to the Gush Valenta Softball Field, in care of the Northampton Recreation Department, 90 Locust St., Northampton, MA, 01060. The Czelusniak Funeral Home has been entrusted with her arrangements.

Owen Boss can be reached at oboss@gazettenet.com.

Let it snow! And it will

By OWEN BOSS

Staff Writer

A nor'easter expected to begin this evening could dump 8 to 10 inches of snow across parts of the Pioneer Valley and has prompted the National Weather Service to institute a winter storm watch for much of the state.

According to News 22 meteorologist Brian Lapis, the storm will last about 18 hours and will start off as a light snow as early as this afternoon, eventually turning to a heavier, wetter snow overnight.

The predicted snowstorm has already spurred at least one cancellation - Cooley Dickinson Hospital's Stroke Support Group, which had been scheduled for Thursday, has been rescheduled to Feb. 24.

The storm, which is expected to taper off sometime late Thursday morning, will follow a record-setting cold snap in the Valley, one that recorded low temperatures at Westover Air Force Base in Chicopee of minus-20 degrees and in Orange of minus-22.

The storm, Lapis predicts, will likely impact this evening's commute, and weather experts are encouraging people to consider leaving work a little early if they travel a long distance to get home.

The storm follows a light snowstorm early Tuesday that snarled traffic for morning commuters on I-91 around Northampton. State police spent about three hours assisting more than a dozen motorists who veered in the median or spun out off I-91 in the greater Northampton area.

Two accidents caused trouble in Hatfield near Exit 22. No injuries were reported, though traffic was backed up in both the northbound and southbound lanes for miles at times during the morning commute.

"We had to remove quite a few of them from the road," said State Police Sgt. Adam Hakkarainen. "People were going too fast."

In one accident in Hatfield, a motorist smashed into a guardrail. In a collision nearby, two vehicles smashed into each other, he said.

"There were calls of cars off I-91 all morning," Hakkarainen said. He noted that state police responded to 14 separate incidents between 6 and 9:30 a.m.

Owen Boss can be reached at oboss@gazettenet.com.

EHS stages the musical 'Funny Girl'

By OWEN BOSS

Staff Writer

EASTHAMPTON - The stage is set, the bright lights are shining and the cast and crew of this year's Easthampton High School Parents Council musical "Funny Girl" are ready for Thursday's opening.

More than 40 local students have been hard at work this week, holding nightly dress rehearsals in the auditorium at White Brook Middle School.

Auditions for the musical were held in October and cast and crew have spent the last three months learning lines and songs, lighting cues and scene changes.

The musical will star recently crowned Easthampton Junior Miss Shealyn Berube, who takes the lead role of Fanny Brice, as well as EHS junior Joe Katusich as her love interest, Nick Arnstein.

The musical is set in pre-World War I New York and is based on the life and career of Broadway and film star Fanny Brice and her stormy relationship with entrepreneur and gambler Nicky Arnstein.

According to EHS junior Elizabeth Burdeau, who is serving as student producer, the cast and crew consist of about a dozen seventh- and eighth-graders and more than 30 local high school students.

"This play has a lot more really interesting characters that are really different from each other than we've had in school plays in the past," Burdeau said.

The production opens Thursday night in the White Brook Middle School auditorium at 6 p.m. Other performances are Friday at 7 p.m.; Saturday at 7 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m.

Tickets are available in advance and at the door. Theatergoers are encouraged to order ahead of time by calling 413-247-9288.

Owen Boss can be reached at oboss@gazettenet.com

Frozen fuel lines spur cancellations in two school districts

By OWEN BOSS

Staff Writer

Students in two local school districts awoke to an unexpected day off this morning, thanks to record low temperatures overnight Sunday that fouled up their school bus fleets.

All public school students in the South Hadley and Central Berkshire school districts received automated alerts between 6 and 7 a.m. announcing that school had been cancelled because bus drivers were unable to start their routes on-schedule.

School officials reported that temperatures, which dipped to -20 degrees Fahrenheit in some parts of Hampshire County, had "gelled" the diesel fuel inside the buses' gas tanks and made starting impossible.

News 22 meteorologist Brian Lapis reported that Westover Air Force Base in Chicopee recorded an all-time overnight low temperature for the date of -20 degrees, which he said would have felt colder because that reading didn't take the wind chill into consideration.

In his eight years of working as South Hadley's superintendent of schools, Gus Sayer said he has seen school start-times delayed as the result of frozen fuel lines but never a full cancellation.

"We had a half-day scheduled today because of a professional day, and ordinarily I would have just postponed school to give the buses time to warm up," Sayer said. "But if we did that, kids would be coming in later and then just turning around and going home, so we couldn't do that."

South Hadley schools, which include Plains Elementary School, Mosier Elementary School, Michael E. Smith Middle School and South Hadley High School, use buses provided by Five Star Transportation Inc., which is located in Agawam but has a bus garage in South Hadley.

Attempts to reach employees at the town's bus garage were unsuccessful this afternoon.

Over at Berkshire Trail Elementary School in Cummington, Principal Lorraine Liantonio was dealing with a very similar situation.

"We had a district-wide cancellation because of our buses being unable to start," Liantonio said. "We always add five extra days to the end of our school calendar, and we've already had four snow days. So we're collecting them too quickly, but we still have one left before we go over."

Schools in the Central Berkshire district, she said, use buses from Dufour Tours Inc., located in Hinsdale.

Kay Hall, an employee at Dufour's school bus garage, said the problem wasn't that the company wasn't prepared for cold weather, but that the overnight low was far lower than expected.

"We haven't seen these kind of temperatures for a long, long time, and whenever you see temperatures drop this low, this is what happens," Hall said.

Owen Boss can oboss@gazettenet.com.

Easthampton man, 52, dies on park bench of apparent exposure to cold

By OWEN BOSS

Staff Writer

EASTHAMPTON - Longtime city resident Mark A. Tiffany was found dead Monday morning on a park bench, likely from exposure to the cold, a friend he was living with has confirmed.

Easthampton police said that at 7:04 a.m. Monday, officers responded to a report that a man had been found unresponsive on Union Street near the city's bike path. Police said the death did not appear suspicious.

Although police declined to identify the victim, Elizabeth Janik, who Tiffany had been staying with since the end of September, said police told her the body was that of Tiffany.

"I've been a friend of his for a long time and when he asked me to help him out, that's what I did," Janik said. Tiffany had been homeless for several years.

Janik said she last saw Tiffany, who was 52, when he left her Ballard Street home at about 12:30 p.m. Sunday to go watch football on television.

According to News 22 meteorologist Ashley Baylor, the overnight low temperature Sunday in the Pioneer Valley was around 7 degrees, but would have felt like 6 below zero with the wind chill.

"Usually if he goes out, he'll call me when he needs me to come pick him up," Janik said of Tiffany. She also said there were times that he didn't come home at all overnight and that he was "battling some personal problems."

Janik said her friend was distressed over the deaths of his brother earlier this month and his father in 2009.

"He just lost his brother a couple of weeks ago and he hasn't been right since," Janik said. "He had been going through a lot lately. He was in a lot of pain, both physically and emotionally."

Family losses

Tiffany's father, Dwight L. Tiffany Sr., died on Nov. 21, 2009 in Holyoke. His brother, Dwight L. Tiffany Jr., 58, of Glendale Road in Southampton, died at his home on Jan. 2. Two other brothers had also died this past decade - Paul Tiffany, 49, in 2004 and Donovan Tiffany, 47, in 2003.

Janik said she and Tiffany had been in a relationship 10 years ago but most recently were living as roommates. When she noticed Tiffany acting increasingly distant, she said she arranged a phone call between the two estranged brothers over Christmas.

"The one thing I am glad about is that I got the two of them on the phone with each other," Janik said. "They may not have been able to hear each other, but at least they were talking."

Robin Bialecki, director of the Easthampton Community Center, said Tiffany had come in regularly for groceries and dinner for the last four or five years. She said she noticed that he seemed different since the death of his brother Dwight this month.

The last time Bialecki saw him, she said, was on a bench near Nashawannuck Pond the day after Dwight Tiffany Jr. died.

"He said 'I'm just really depressed,'" Bialecki said. "He said, 'I'm the last one of my family ... I don't want to be the last one of my family.'"

Sleeping outdoors

Although he was wearing a heavy jacket he had received at the community center, Bialecki gave him a ride to Janik's home on Ballard Street and told him that it was far too cold to stay outdoors on a bench overnight. His response, she said, was that he "was warm enough."

Bialecki said Tiffany had been known to stay outdoors overnight, often sleeping on a wooden observation deck at Nashawannuck Pond.

When she saw a row of police cruisers near Big E's Supermarket on Union Street Monday morning, Bialecki said she suspected the worst.

"I thought it was him. I said 'Oh my gosh it's probably Mark,'" she said. "I wished when I had been with him last week and gave him a ride that I could have done more. Sometimes as much help as you can give somebody - it's just not enough."

Staff writer Matt Pilon contributed to this story.