Broadcast from Oak Bluffs

Listen to the voters in Oak Bluffs; their collective voice is loud and clear. At the annual town election in April they swept two longtime incumbent selectmen out of office and voted in two newcomers. At a special town election last week they broadcast a forceful message about their desire to curb spending and balance the town budget in real time, rejecting by a wide margin two questions that would have allowed the town to exceed the state law that caps annual property tax increases at two and a half per cent.

Going Places

From Gazette editions of June, 1936:

The season of 1936 has been coming in on a bicycle, and many observers have looked up, startled, to see it coming in on a bicycle built for two. An older generation had forgotten all about the tandem bicycle, and a younger generation has never heard of it. There is a pleasant surprise to see the two-seater skimming along the street, its two riders enjoying sensations which the human race was silly ever to have surrendered.

Greenlands is a 360-acre environmental gem located in the heart of our Island. Greenlands was purchased by the town of West Tisbury to protect the crown of our Island’s sensitive sole-source aquifer as a future source of public water supply. Since its creation in 1982, parts of this critically important Island asset have been systematically transformed into an elaborate motorcross bike track.

It doesn’t get any better — you just get used to it.”

Hearing this a couple of months after the death of my wife, Ella Tulin, was like a kick in the stomach, but over the succeeding year there were many occasions when this phrase was the only solid anchor in an emotional turmoil.