Opinion
The third annual Martha’s Vineyard Living Local and Harvest Festival just ended. For the second year, it began with a Friday night forum. This one was a panel discussion with the next generation of Island leaders.
It was about young people and their relationship with the Island and its future.
Having just turned 60, I am acutely aware of the role of young people (in their 20s and 30s) in both my work and civic life. At work they are a constant theme and a growing force.
By the time 1962 finally rolled around I was sitting in the front row of Mrs. Grady’s class learning the proper way to address a business letter. I had already learned left from right, could tell time, tie my own shoes and best of all, I could read.
Now we were practicing the precise manner in which one conducted a correspondence. I wasn’t sure why we were learning how to write a business letter in the third grade but the prescribed salutation remains etched in my brain: “Dear Sir or Madam.”
THANKS FOR COPING
Editors, Vineyard Gazette:
The Oak Bluffs water district would like to take this opportunity to express our thanks to all those departments and individuals who assisted us with the recent Department of Environmental Protection imposed boil-water order and especially the Oak Bluffs selectmen, town administrator Michael Dutton, emergency management coordinator Peter Martell, board of health chairman Shirley Fauteux, Oak Bluffs police and fire departments, and many more.
My sister, Lucy Hart Abbot, died this morning, Oct. 3. She was 87 years old and died, essentially, of old age.
Everyone called her Bideau. Originally my parents called her Billy Lu. That was at the start, after she was born on Hart street in New Britain, Conn. That southern-style adoption of their own names, Lucy and Bill, would not endure. My brother couldn’t say the words and called his older sister Bideau. And so her distinctive name came to be, leading many people to assume she had been born in France.
In June my sister, Carole Cowan Dunscombe, died at the age of 51. My parents survived her as no parent should have to do. The timeliness of the Children’s Memorial at Edgartown Light couldn’t have been any better and my parents were able to have a stone placed there in her memory. Carole couldn’t get down to the lighthouse due to her wheelchair, however she spent many days looking out on the light from Memorial Wharf.
Editors, Vineyard Gazette:
It is my understanding that the Henry Beetle Hough house has been destroyed by its new and clearly bored owners. It is not unusual for such people to “move on” after an ownership of about seven years, possibly to commit historical and architectural mayhem elsewhere.