For Richard E. Lee

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

Richard Lee was a star, he sparkled, he winked at you through his paintings and made us laugh; all the while he was watching us and laughing. He had an aura of sparklers surrounding him, a bit of Puck’s spirit lived within.

Richard, you have brought us joy in this lifetime, thank you and please, keep twinkling and rearranging the starry-starry sky in your vision.

Wendy Arnell Brophy

Vineyard Haven

• Stylistic Mishmash

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

We were Vineyard summer dinks, or at its most deroga tory, just dinks. We drove up from New Jersey each year, just after school let out, and stayed until Labor Day in my grandparents’ house on Pennacook avenue in Oak Bluffs. My mother, a teacher, stayed the whole summer, too, but my father had to make do with weekends and whatever vacation he could save up.

I heard tales from my mother of how lonely my father was sweating it out back home. We lived close to the stinky part of New Jersey where the air smells like a bad meal left out to rot for weeks.

From the Vineyard Gazette editions of August, 1970:

A writer’s retreat, a think tank, a junior college, an experimental division of the University of Massachusetts, a vocational school, a microcosm for study of the environment, a structured college — all were among proposals made Wednesday for a new kind of institution of higher education on the Vineyard.

Nineteen per cent of the approximately 42 miles of sand beach on the Vineyard are open without exception to the general public. By any ordinary standard it would seem that 19 per cent — almost a fifth — was an extremely generous proportion.

Driving along State Road in West Tisbury, one might not notice a new addition to the landscape, but peer closely and you will be rewarded.