Opinion
Restoring Great Salt Pond
The draft Massachusetts Estuaries Project report on the Edgartown Great Pond obtained by the Gazette last week is required reading for all who live on the Vineyard. The conclusions of the report may be obvious, but no less startling on an Island with a long history of strictly protecting its pristine environment, and they extend well beyond the sandy perimeters of the Edgartown Great Pond: encroaching development and nitrogen escaping from septic systems are polluting Island ponds.
A Linotype Man to the End
Jonathan Sawyer, whose unexpected death Nov. 21 was reported in last Friday’s Gazette, was for twenty years a mainstay of this paper’s back shop printing staff.
Jon joined the Gazette staff part-time while he was still in school, following his frequent encounters on Pease’s Point Way with Elizabeth Bowie Hough, the paper’s late copublisher and editor with her husband the late Henry Beetle Hough. She would often give young Jon a ride, warning him that it was much too cold for walking.
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.
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.
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.
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.