For 134 years the modest cedar-shingled post office of Cuttyhunk has served as a lifeline to the mainland for this isolated community. Now with the U.S. Postal Service facing declining revenues and cutbacks, the Cuttyhunk branch faces the prospect of closure, along with 43 other post offices in Massachusetts identified in a nationwide review.
Father Thomas C. Lopes had never been to Cuttyhunk until last Sunday morning.
Traveling on a 26-foot patrol boat owned by the Dukes County Sheriff’s department, Father Lopes crossed the water to the small chain of Elizabeth Islands to offer a Mass in the Union Methodist Church on Cuttyhunk.
A Vineyard native, the 72-year-old priest had served on Nantucket from 1991 to 2000, an Island hop of a different nature. He is now retired.
The tiny population of Cuttyhunk has won its David and Goliath battle with Comcast. The giant telecommunications company this week reversed its decision to pull the plug on the islanders’ do-it-yourself high speed Internet service.
Cuttyhunkers are expected to rejoin the modern world within the next week, as soon as Comcast can wrap up a formal vendor agreement with the man who had developed the island’s innovative wireless network over the past five years, Mark Storek.
Okay, so maybe what the residents of Cuttyhunk were doing in order to get their high-speed Internet service was not strictly legal, but goodness, it was clever. It showed, they will tell you, the sort of inventiveness that made America great.
But Comcast doesn’t see it that way. To the giant telecommunications company, what the Cuttyhunkers did was theft, pure and simple. And so they have pulled the plug on the islanders, casting them back into the dark ages, online-communications-wise.
Initially Margaret Martin thought the want ad for a Cuttyhunk schoolteacher contained a typographical error. Scouring a jobs Web site for the Cape and Islands area in the spring of 2003, she saw an entry for a school with one student. She wasn’t reassured when she traveled to Rehoboth to meet Russell Latham, the district superintendent, and found that the listed address was actually a private residence. Sensing the whole thing might be an elaborate joke, she almost drove home to Long Island.
On Cuttyhunk, Sight of Godspeed Brings Joy
By JAMES KINSELLA
Gazette Senior Writer
CUTTYHUNK - Late Monday afternoon, Cuttyhunk residents were sitting around, a popular Island pursuit, when they spied the sails of a 1600s sailing vessel nearing Penikese.
It was the Godspeed!
Residents raced down to the harbor for their boats in unCuttyhunk-like haste.