Oak Bluffs has long been a town of multiple personalities — some exuberant, some rough and tumble, some flashy and artistic, some quietly generous. One of our least favorites, the one that is prone to recklessness after a few drinks, seemed to dominate last weekend. The police log tells the story of a raucous Saturday night marred by a range of bad behavior and resulting in numerous arrests. Reviewing the weekend, town officials were careful not to blame the Monster Shark Tournament, but count us among those who are glad to see it over.

Why did the chicken cross the road?

We can finally put paid to this old joke because the answer, after visiting 17-year-old Cord Bailey’s 11 chickens and single rooster on State Road in Vineyard Haven, is that none of his chickens has ever crossed the busy road, nor even set claw on the sidewalk.

“They know their own boundaries,” said Cord, although the band of fowls also takes a proprietary interest in the lush, shaded lawn next door. “The neighbors don’t mind,” he added, “In fact, they like the chickens!”

As I sat with my family Sunday, eating blueberry pancakes under piercing blue skies at the Katama Airfield — along with dozens of others outside the small restaurant there — it occurred to me that what makes this such a popular spot is our continual fascination with air flight. In an age of routine jet travel and near-routine orbital space missions, we still get a kick out of seeing small antique planes huff and puff along the bumpy grass airstrip and pull themselves up above South Beach, and then set down only a few yards away from us.

If you haven’t heard about the latest incendiary human who used an arsenal of firearms to blow away a dozen Colorado moviegoers as well as injure nearly five dozen more, then you must be living under a rock. And if that’s where you are, then if I were you, I’d stay there. That’s probably the last safe place in America.

From Gazette editions of July, 1960:

Joseph C. Whitney of Edgartown and Westwood garnered an experience Friday afternoon that will make more than a footnote if he ever decides to write an autobiography. He landed a single engine Commanche, of which he was the only occupant, without the benefit of wheels.

This column by Arthur Railton appeared in the Vineyard Gazette in June 1990:

All of a sudden, like the curtain going up at a Broadway musical, the beat has started. Longer lines at checkout counters, bumper-to-bumper along Main street, no place to park. More cars than pickup trucks. It’s that time again. For me, it’s not an easy time. My conscience gets in the way. It’s look-in-the-mirror time. Time to ask myself if I’m still the courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, etc., man that my Scoutmaster told me to be.