Phyllis Meras
The Animal Shelter of Martha’s Vineyard’s fourth annual fundraiser added more than $10,000 to shelter coffers on Sunday, with an additional $15,000 received from shelter supporters unable to attend the event.
Painting ought to come naturally to West Tisbury’s John Athearn. George Brehm, the Saturday Evening Post cover illustrator and children’s book illustrator, was his grandfather. George’s brother, Worth, also a Post cover illustrator and children’s book illustrator, was his great uncle. His aunt June Tabor of Chilmark is a painter. His niece Morgan Taylor is a graphic artist. And West Tisbury painter Allen Whiting is a third cousin.
Monday, June seventh marked 25 years since Henry Beetle Hough, the founder of Sheriff’s Meadow, and for 45 years the editor and publisher of this paper, died at his Edgartown home. From the window of his upstairs study, he had looked out for decades onto Sheriff’s Meadow Pond gleaming in the sun. And most days, until his final months, he and one of his collies would set off mornings through the pine and oak and cedar woods of Sheriff’s Meadow. They would cross the dam separating the pond from John Butler’s Mudhole.
Gladys Widdiss of Aquinnah, a longtime Native American leader, noted potter and tribal historian who led the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head for many years, died at the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital on Wednesday. Although she was 97 and frail, Mrs. Widdiss was alert and active. The day before she died she had gone on a happy outing to the cliffs and Menemsha, and in recent weeks she had enjoyed trips to the Whiting Farm with Lynn Whiting of West Tisbury, a Hospice volunteer who was a frequent visitor, and afternoons of card playing.
Not long ago West Tisbury was described, using a line from the Oliver Goldsmith poem, as “the fairest village of the plain.” But with the addition of brick sidewalks in front of the town hall and between the First Congregational Church and Alley’s General Store, citification has come. There’s still a general store, of course, and a Farmers’ Market twice a week in summer and the Agricultural Fair in August, but now suddenly the town has surrendered its fairest village status in favor of modernity. And it’s too bad.
Margaret Howe Freydberg of Chilmark was 104 in March and celebrated this month with the publication of her 11th book, Cruachan: The Battle Cry of Scottish Chieftains. It is a long short story, originally written many years ago, after her first and only visit to Scotland in the 1950s. Recently, she discovered her old writings while exploring a trunk. Reading over the manuscript, written so long ago as to be the product of a comparatively young woman, she realized the work called for a revision. And so, she emphasizes, the book is not just some old jottings found in a trunk.