Vineyard Haven Hosts New Year Festival

By C.K. WOLFSON

Perhaps nature was conspiring against Island holiday celebrations by subjecting First Day activities in Vineyard Haven Wednesday to the same chilly rain that dampened the Christmas weekend in Edgartown. Town streets were almost deserted, stores darkened and colors faded to gray.

But nature was no match for the laughing, energetic children who were entertained at the town's churches and gathering places. It was a day that owed its brightness to the smiles of Island children and their parents.

"Christmas was about getting nothing," she says in clipped Yankee cadence. Lorraine Beaucaire Clark's family did not speak English when they came from Portugal; her great-uncle, a Chilmark resident for 55 years,speaks only Portuguese.

Speak English: That's the Goal for Newcomers

By C.K. WOLFSON

Antonio Santos is waiting.

The 42-year old Reliable Market employee, an Island resident for almost two years, is fluent enough in English to have become a department manager at the Oak Bluffs market and to teach Portuguese to English-speaking Islanders. "So why do I need a tutor," he says, explaining, "I want to improve my accent and grammar so I can have more friends; so I can express my ideas in a clever way and because I don't want to sound stupid - because I am not stupid."

Let Good Times Roll for Grads in Class of 1960

By C.K. WOLFSON

The cheerleaders are now grandmothers.

And they're celebrating. It's a communal 60th birthday party hosted by Island members of the Class of 1960 - the first graduating class of Martha's Vineyard Regional High School.

There is something comforting in the connection between old-fashioned, farm-grown accomplishments, community pride and simple pleasures.