Mark Alan Lovewell
The history of the Island’s main streets is written on the facades of the older buildings. The three down-Island main streets all have their stories — and their storytellers.
Main street is memory lane for those who share in the fellowship of growing up, playing and working on the pavement and along the side streets.
Richard Clark of Vineyard Haven, Dennis daRosa of Oak Bluffs and Edward (Peter) W. Vincent Jr. of Edgartown all have spent most of their lives stepping, smelling and breathing the life on the down-Island sidewalks and streets.
By MARK ALAN LOVEWELL
The surprise 60th wedding anniversary party for Louis S. and Mary Larsen on Sunday at the Chilmark Community Center will go down in history as one of the town’s great capers.
The ability of 200 people to keep the secret from Chilmark’s notoriously in-the-know couple was remarkable.
A number of different organizations, from assisted living facilities to councils on aging, help cover the needs of the aging on the Vineyard.
Now a new paid membership organization is offering service via telephone to the senior citizen in need of a little help getting through the day.
Vineyard Village at Home is a club that wants to be the first call by older Island residents when it comes to getting the errands of life done, such as fixing a leaky faucet or getting a ride to the doctor’s office.
Herring are harbingers of spring. The first of them usually appear in Island waters now. But there is serious concern about the health of the fishery across the region.
Although Massachusetts is in the third year of a moratorium on the harvesting of these small fish, the fishery has failed to rebound. Fishing prohibitions are also in place in Connecticut and Rhode Island.
Also known as alewives and river herring, these anadromous fish make a pilgrimage every spring into coastal estuaries, to spawn in the freshwater pond where they themselves were created.
First there was one opening and now there are two at Norton Point Beach.
The second, closer to the Chappaquiddick side, occurred on the weekend of March 8 and 9 during the height of a windy storm.
Between the two openings, there is a 150-yard little island. It already has the name Charlie’s Island.
“You’ve heard of Gilligan’s Island. This is Charlie’s Island,” said Chris Kennedy of The Trustees of Reservations.
The whaling era is a Vineyard story. Martha’s Vineyard whaling captains and their crew traveled the globe. They went to New Zealand, to Japan, north into the frigid seas of the Arctic, and as far south as the ice-filled waters of Antarctica.