Wednesday, April 19, 1961 --

• Superintendent of Schools Royd A. Mahaffey and school board President William S. Moore announced that the new junior high school on East College Avenue will be named for the man considered the architect of Wicomico’s modern school system, James. M. Bennett. The new school is expected to cost $1.5 million, will accommodate 1,200 students and will take 16 months to construct. Bennett, the longtime county schools leader, died earlier this year.
• The Salisbury Retailers Association formally endorsed a City Manager form of government for the city of Salisbury. The city now operates under a mayor and council model, with an Executive Secretary who derives powers from the mayor. Men’s store owner Clement I. Gaskill said the national trend was directed toward implementing City Manager forms of government and that would best fit Salisbury.
• Olive Banks, a teacher of second-graders at Pinehurst Elementary, will retire at the end of the school year, completing 44 years of instruction in the county’s schools system. A veteran of several of the county’s rural one-room school houses, Mrs. Banks never had children. She and her husband, Glenwood Banks, manager of the White Candy Co., live on West College Avenue. 
• There will be just 184 days of school for Wicomico students in 1961-62, the school board agrees this week. Schools will open Sept. 5 and the year will end June 13. The three-days decrease is designed to allow more days for summer school, which is for both remedial and advanced study.
• At Read’s new deluxe Town & Country Restaurant in Downtown Salisbury, the breaded veal cutlet with tomato sauce, buttered whipped potatoes, string beans, hot rolls, and a piece of layer cake or Jello was priced at $1.20. Thursday’s Braised Swiss Steak lunch special was priced at .85 cents.
• State Roads Commission Chairman John B. Funk announced that Route 50 across the Eastern Shore will finally be a continuously dual highway by 1965. A contract was issued this week to dualize a five-mile section of Route 50 near Wye Mills. Under construction now is a dualization from Berlin, two miles west to St. Martin in Worcester County. The Salisbury Thruway will begin construction this winter and the road will be four lanes all the way to Ocean City within five years. The commission’s determination to have a dual highway from the Bay Bridge to Ocean City has been decried as wasteful spending, but Funk said state leaders have “an obligation to provide safe and efficient access to recreational shore points from the great metropolitan areas of the western shore.”
• Larmar Corp. owner and founder George Chandler was honored with the Civic Award given by the Salisbury Chamber of Commerce. After a career as a sales manager at E.S. Adkins Co., Chandler formed Lamar in 1932 and became Salisbury’s leading commercial and residential developer. Rather than take the conservative approach his peers adopted after The Great Depression, Chandler aggressively pursued constriction endeavours. More than 300 people attended the awards event at the Wicomico High School Cafeteria.