Union Okays SSA Contract

Unlicensed Deck Hands Ratify Agreement With Management, Reversing Vote from June; Governors Vote Friday

By MIKE SECCOMBE

Some 200 employees of the Steamship Authority have voted to accept a new workplace agreement, substantially unchanged from the one they rejected last month.

Twenty-five years ago, Susan Klein leapt into the void, counting on her muse to catch her. She was 30 years old, born and raised in Oak Bluffs, but she just knew "it was time to go."

"I had just bought the house, the mortgage was due," she recalled. "I'd quit my job, I had no health insurance, no retirement, no savings. I had $300 and I drove away. I had nine days' of work scheduled for the rest of my life."

The dire forecast for the future of the Vineyard environment, signed onto by the Island's major conservation groups 10 years ago this week, was wro

Michael J. Fox, television and movie star, has walked his share of red carpets over the years. These days, though, he walks a more nondescript bit of floor covering: a cheap sisal mat in the garage of his Aquinnah house. Pacing, back and forth, doing laps of the pool table trying to harness the involuntary energy of his illness. Hours upon hours of pacing.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are out walking, and come across a child obviously drowning in a pond.

There is no one else around. You know the pond is not deep enough to drown you and that there are no dangerous things, like alligators, in the water. The only small cost to you is that you might ruin a good pair of shoes, and your clothes will need dry cleaning.

The first of the long-awaited studies of the health of Vineyard ponds by the Massachusetts Estuaries Project is set to be released within weeks and will recommend significant changes to the management of the Edgartown Great Pond.