David McCullough laughingly calls the pretty little eight-by-10-foot structure in his back yard his “world headquarters.” Naturally, he was keen to pass on the details of its architecture and history.

“This is where I’ve worked since 1972,” he said. “It was built by Alan Miller, an artist with carpentry. He built the Black Dog in Vineyard Haven. He built numerous buildings around the Island, all distinctive.”

It seems appropriate, somehow, that the first reward Bethany Pennington received upon hearing that she was the valedictorian of the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School class of 2009 was extra homework.

“The principal called me into his office and said, ‘You’re the valedictorian. You have to make a speech at graduation and it’s due in three weeks,’” she said, laughing, in an interview at her father’s office yesterday.

They are tallish, spare and almost laconic men.

Thomas Bena, founder of the Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival, stood in front of a mostly full house at the Chilmark community center last Wednesday night, and shared an anecdote.

“I can remember one night a few years ago when a man approached me on his way out the door. He told me that he appreciated what we were doing here, but that the film we had just shown was repetitive and just generally not very good. I thanked him for his thoughts and was watching him leave when someone else came up to me and said ‘Do you know who that guy was?’”

Sitting outside Up-Island Cronig’s earlier this week, Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School’s 2008 valedictorian Truman French appeared to wearing much of the earth he had shifted around a Chilmark home that day, during a 12-hour landscaping shift.

“I’m trying to get a couple years’ college paid for,” he explained. Along with the rest of his class, Truman finished his final classes less than a week ago.

When Warren Doty first moved the Vineyard in the late 1970s, the Menemsha harborfront was booming.

“Then there were five boats landing 10,000 pounds of sea scallops every three days,” he recalled. “There was a work force of ten shuckers in three different shucking shacks. That’s 30 Islanders working on the docks with about fifteen on boats. The season lasted from October to April every year. There were 45 to 50 jobs in Menemsha for six to eight months during the season.