QUICK RESPONSE

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

My family and I would like to thank the Edgartown police department and the Edgartown fire department wholeheartedly for their timely and effective response to the fire at our house early Monday morning caused by an act of arson. We would particularly like to offer our thanks and gratitude to Mike Snowden of the police department, who put his life in jeopardy by entering our house in order to extinguish the fire.

I learned about buying and selling Woof Tickets while teaching graphic arts in the New York city public schools. In my students’ neighborhood, if you were able to intimidate someone, that person bought your Woof Ticket. To survive in such a neighborhood, a student had to be able to sell but never buy a Woof Ticket. Buying and selling Woof Tickets also extends into the world of adults and politics. In fact, in one case, selling a Woof Ticket may have achieved a seat on the Supreme Court.

We few, we band of brothers and sisters, all six billion of us on planet earth, have identified the problem and we’ve identified the solution. We’re all in agreement about who is what. Even those who are classified as the problem know they’re the problem. And yet they continue to charge around like the bulls of Pamplona. I’m talking, of course, about drivers of cars.

There have been many televised and Internet reports about potential Koran burnings and Muslim worship centers of late. Sadly, most of them have been from a biased viewpoint that does nothing to alleviate concerns, but rather continues to feed irrational fears of the unknown and the “other.” This is nothing new to Martha’s Vineyard as we continue to see in letters to the editor that oftentimes overtly blame an entire group (read: ethnic group) of people for the actions of an individual.

Autumn Tales

From Gazette editions of October, 1935:

Library Jump Start

Edgartown prides itself on a long and well-earned reputation as a town of fiscal expediency with no infighting. But the story of the Edgartown Public Library expansion has been the exception to the rule in this town of white clapboard whaling captain’s homes, rose-covered fences and, in the middle of it all, the Carnegie building, a beautiful red brick structure that houses the town library on South Water street.

The Carnegie building needs renovation work and the library needs more space.