David Stanwood, piano player, piano lover, technician and innovator, recalls being “spoiled” at an early age, by an accidental encounter with a single instrument.
It was a seven-foot Bösendorfer, in a show room, and when he played it, he said: “I felt as if I’d put on magic gloves.”
It wasn’t just the tone; it was the touch.
From little things, big things grow.
A little over 50 years ago, Henry Beetle Hough became concerned that a little parcel of land in Edgartown, where he and his wife Elizabeth liked to walk, might fall prey to land developers.
Mr. Hough, then owner and editor of this paper and an author, used the money earned from sales of one of his books, Once More the Thunderer, to buy the 10 acres which had been known for at least the previous century as Sheriff’s Meadow.
One of the land bank’s Island jewels, Ice House Pond near Lambert’s Cove, was briefly closed over the weekend, due to suspected contamination with human waste.
The pond was closed on Friday afternoon, but reopened again on Sunday after testing revealed no bacterial contamination of the water.
Matthew Dix, the property foreman for the land bank, said the decision to close the pond was taken after a swimmer alerted staff on Friday afternoon that she had spotted something floating near the access dock.
When people think of American history of the mid-1800s, they usually think of the great westward expansion, the opening up of new territory, of covered wagons and the forging of the American frontier myth.
But, as historian David McCullough notes in the first chapter of his latest book: “Not all the pioneers went west.”
A lot went the other way, too, intent on opening up new territories of their minds. And many went to France.
As part of the deal to get into Cuba to make his movie, producer Kris Meyer had to take part in a baseball game, an all-ages, goodwill game with a Cuban team in Cuba.
He did not play well.
“The gentleman that struck me out was 75,” he told a packed house after the screening of The Lost Son of Havana, the story of Luis Tiant, at the Chilmark Community Center on Wednesday night.
He was crushed too, in left field, when he lost sight of a catch — “It went so high” — and it landed at his feet.
A proposal to allow the only commercial wind farms in state waters close to the western end of the Vineyard has been advanced without due consideration of the views of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), tribal historic preservation officer Bettina Washington said yesterday.
Under the draft ocean management plan released last week by the state, as many as 166 wind turbines might be built in two areas, around Noman’s Land and off Cuttyhunk, as near as three miles offshore.
