Commentary
Thanksgiving 2007
FOR NANCY WHITING
Editors, Vineyard Gazette:
I was saddened to learn of the recent death of Nancy Whiting, former librarian of the West Tisbury library. She made it classy to love books, and generations of up-Islanders benefitted from it.
I’m trying to be thankful, and that should be easy at this time of year. Here I am in Chilmark where I enjoy the legacy left by my parents, Henry and Peggy Scott. That legacy is our family house, facing south on South Road, set between old roadside stone walls, close to an open meadow and looking south toward Chilmark Pond and the sea. Known in the community as the Scott House, my dad had named it Pipe Down, after his days in the U.S. Navy, 1944-45, then stationed on Martha’s Vineyard.
Even before the 30th annual Island Cup game began on Saturday, things didn't look good for the visiting Whalers from Nantucket.
When the players in blue and white stormed the field before the game and tried to plant their flag, the wooden mast snapped in half and the Whalers' banner fell onto the ground.
Things only got worse for the Whalers after that.
The Vineyard exploded for 28 second quarter points, all fueled by Nantucket turnovers, to put the game out of reach early en route to a 48-6 drubbing.
A Real Thanksgiving
Written by Henry Beetle Hough. From the Vineyard Gazette edition of Nov. 19, 1971:
Thanksgiving editorials and proclamations are, in general, too “usual”; there is nothing one needs to know less about in order to produce an appropriate measure of rhetoric. Thanksgiving is able to carry itself and should continue to do so, but just the same I’d like to write something a little apart from the inherited pattern.
Teller of Tales
From the Vineyard Gazette editions of April, 1932:
While many of Vineyard Haven lawyer Charles H. Brown’s recollections are of his own town, not all of them are, and not all are tales of his own time.