Public Safety Alert: Children at Play

In one more sign of the changing season, today is the last day of school for most Island public schools (the Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School had its last day yesterday.) The familiar yellow buses that roll on Island roads early in the morning and again in the afternoon throughout the fall, winter and spring, are ready for decommissioning as transportation vehicles for our most precious resource — Vineyard school children. At least until just after Labor Day.

Unfortunate License

The very thought that walking down a Vineyard beach and casting a fishing line into the ocean will require a license would appall and anger generations of fishermen stretching deep into the Island’s past.

The same restriction on fishing in freshwater ponds likely would have struck Island fishermen of past centuries as a foolhardy and unwarranted invasion of the government in a matter that was none of its business.

PARKING JUSTICE

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

Last weekend  provided two different aspects of life on the Island: delight — and dismay.

On Saturday and Sunday, a group called the Boston Area Roadsters Club brought a number of shiningly restored vintage cars. Part of the welcome the Island offers this group, apparently, is permission to park on both sides of Lake avenue, which is the road that runs along the base of the Oak Bluffs harbor, for the three days of their annual meeting. 

All the Social News

From the Vineyard Gazette editions of June, 1908:

Those from Edgartown, in all numbering twenty-three, who attended the Neighborhood Convention at Gay Head on Tuesday, report a most delightful day. The start was made, five teams in all, at the early hour of six in the morning, and the arrival home was about eight in the evening, four hours on the road each way.

Confronting the Pump

On Thursday, the Vineyard Transit Authority will mark nationwide Dump the Pump Day — an annual occasion that calls on people to use public transportation to save money, conserve gasoline and reduce greenhouse gases — by cutting its already bargain fares in half and holding a party at the youth hostel in West Tisbury.

Sometimes referred to as the enigmatic man of American letters, the late William Styron was a longtime fixture on outer Main street in Vineyard Haven where he spent nearly 50 summers. Mr. Styron died in November 2006 and is buried in Vineyard Haven. A collection of 14 personal essays written by him was released in April of this year. Titled Havanas in Camelot, the essays range from a reminiscence of his brief friendship with John F. Kennedy to a meditation on Mark Twain. What follows is the essay Walking With Aquinnah, an account of his daily walks with his dog.