ALL WELCOME HERE

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

From the Vineyard Gazette editions of May, 1983:

There is no true analogy between the migration of birds and the comings and goings of seasonal vacationers on Martha’s Vineyard, the regular ones, the ones who have been coming for years and years, yet in both cases there is a design, and maybe an appropriate relevance of the stars in the heavens. An unforgotten grandmother who owned a cottage on the Camp Ground in Oak Bluffs always planned her arrival to take place just after “the cold May storm.”

I was hoping for beginner’s luck when a friend introduced me to the rites of surf casting on South Beach one morning. It was a very early morning, by this retiree’s standards, anyway — barely rise and no shine. Are fish clear-eyed at this time of day? Would the early worm get the fish?

Museum in Limbo

Less than two years ago, the board and staff of the Martha’s Vineyard Historical Society, now called the Martha’s Vineyard Museum, were brimming with optimism about their chances for raising twenty-five million or more dollars to pay for an extensive new campus in West Tisbury. The time had come, they said, to give the society’s extensive historical collection the display that it had long deserved, in a beautiful and spacious setting on property along the Panhandle Road.

Spring Litter

Last week on Earth Day, 26 Island beaches were cleared of empty bottles and cans, plastic odds and ends and other debris. The beaches are much the better for it; 250 volunteers filled 250 bags.

It is fun to find an occasional treasure on a Vineyard beach after the long winter, but such treasures are few and far between. So the annual Earth Day Cleanup sponsored by the Vineyard Conservation Society is welcome each spring.

Garage With a View

The controversy over Joseph G. Moujabber’s illegal garage in Oak Bluffs has gone on for a long time — too long — and that may be the only point on which Mr. Moujabber and his neighbors can agree.

But the neighbors have good reason to be upset, and indeed, this conflict has struck a chord that has rung out around the Island, far beyond the North Bluff neighborhood of modest bungalows situated about a nine-iron shot from Nantucket Sound.