Mark Alan Lovewell
It reads like an old feel-good, hometown story. A local boy grows up on the Vineyard, watching his father and mother work hard. The father works for the Steamship Authority and then later runs an ice cream stand. His mother works at the local grocery store. The youth goes off to college, enters the corporate world, gets a master’s degree from Columbia Business School, and, through a line of successes, he and his wife decide to come home and take ownership of a longtime local business.
That is George J. Rogers Jr. of Tisbury and his story.
A treasure box discovered last month by Cub Scouts playing at Camp Duarte has been returned to its owner.
Rob Seaton, 33, an Oak Bluffs contractor, said the box of precious family items was stolen from his mother’s house in Vineyard Haven, October 2002.
Catherine Kilduff has a childhood memory of summering in Vineyard Haven and having a day at the beach when she found a number of spider crabs. She recalled hand-feeding one of the crabs with the meat she plucked from a limpet. It was June, an early visit to the Island. “I must have been 11 or 12 years old,” she said.
A valiant effort to save the life of two malnourished baby otters came to an end over the weekend.
One otter, found in a yard in Oak Bluffs on Thursday afternoon and sent Friday morning to the Trailside Museum in Milton, died over the weekend. A second baby otter, recovered on Friday not far from where the first otter had been found, also died.
The two otters, about eight weeks old, lost their mother when she was hit and killed on Barnes Road in Oak Bluffs on the morning of June 7.
Herring are back and the numbers are stronger compared with a year ago. Also known as alewives, herring are one of the true coastal signs of spring and considered essential bait fish in the food chain.
While the reports of numbers this spring are improved over last year, they are at best cautiously optimistic. A state moratorium prohibiting the catching of herring has been in place since 2005. The ban was a response to a dramatic drop in the numbers of fish returning in the spring of 2004 and before. Recovery has been slow, if at all, until this spring.
The Vineyard has changed a lot since 1975. The landscape, the people and the place have all changed.
But if there is one constant in a sea of change for the past 36 years, surely it is William Wilcox. He was the face of the county extension service for so many years people stopped counting, there at the ready to help Vineyard farmers with their crops, their soil and their pests. And for many more years he has been the water quality resource planner for the Martha’s Vineyard Commission.