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Friday, February 5, 2010

In a rough pen sketch dated March 26, 1958, you can just make out a figure standing at the side of a boat, hauling a lobster pot. The sketch appears to be three-dimensional, with a series of knot-like shapes along the top. A note next to the shapes reads, “hands in sky.”
» Full Story By Megan Dooley

Studies have shown, and plenty of them, that pets of the canine variety are so good for our health, happiness and longevity that if medical science could have seen it coming, they would have found a way for doctors to prescribe dogs.
» Full Story By Holly Nadler

Feature Stories from the Vineyard Gazette Archives

Friday, January 29, 2010

Victoria Campbell is, as she said yesterday, not a real nurse. A week ago she had not seen a human skull in surgery, assisted in amputations or dressed jagged gouges the size of her fist at the base of a man’s spinal cord. “I’d have been queasy just at the thought,” she said in a voice betraying her own disbelief at the time she has just spent in a Haitian hospital.
» Full Story By Lauren Martin

With tape measure draped around his neck and a thimble on his thumb, Francois Delphin sits behind a faded Singer machine, tending to the cuffs of a pair of khakis. “A good tailor is very hard to find,” he says, removing his glasses. “It’s not a trade people learn anymore.” Mr. Delphin owns Francois’ Fine Tailoring and Alterations on Upper Main street in Edgartown. He learned to tailor at a trade school near his childhood home in Gonaives, a port city in northern Haiti.
» Full Story By Peter Brannen

Friday, January 22, 2010

The theme this year was youth, including youthful viewpoints and honors for people who work with youth, at the annual Martin Luther King Jr. day brunch, hosted by the Vineyard chapter of the NAACP. The event took place at Deon’s Restaurant in Oak Bluffs on Monday and was attended by over 100 people. It was a celebration both of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the work that the NAACP and those affiliated with the organization have done and continue to do. The two guest speakers and a quartet of musicians all were students from the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School.
» Full Story By Jonah Lipsky

Friday, January 15, 2010

You can tell a meal is almost ready when you begin to catch the full scent wafting from the oven, instructor Carol McManus told 10 chefs-in-the-making as they sat to enjoy a bread and cheese plate in a home economics classroom at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School Tuesday night.
» Full Story By Megan Dooley

Dozens of curious Islanders turned out to take part in Saturday’s green tour of the affordable housing project under construction at 250 State Road in West Tisbury. The sun was shining on a bitterly cold day as members of the Island Housing Trust and South Mountain Company led visitors through three solar homes in various stages of completion.
» Full Story By Megan Dooley

Friday, January 8, 2010

Down an unplowed path in West Tisbury behind an ox pen sits a house at the edge of the woods. The bitterly cold morning has not yet broken and the snow is glowing a pale moonlit blue, but inside the lights are on and the tenants are restless. Bob Woodruff is preparing his team for the 50th annual Martha’s Vineyard Christmas Bird Count, delayed this year until Jan. 5 by the weather.
» Full Story By Peter Brannen

Friday, January 1, 2010

A photographic look back at the next-to-last year of the first decade of the new millennium.
» Full Story

It may have been a Christmas miracle or just a lucky break, but Oak Bluffs resident Christopher Dacunto was reunited with his pet kitten Harabe over the holiday weekend under unlikely circumstances following a major car accident on the highway just outside Old Mystic, Conn.
» Full Story By Jim Hickey

Friday, December 25, 2009

The weeks leading up to Christmas are filled with longing and expectation. This is the season of Advent, which culminates in the birth of Jesus. As we sing in the hymn, O Little Town of Bethlehem, “the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.” We know quite a bit about these hopes and fears from reading the Hebrew prophets and the Gospels. And the age-old hopes and fears are not so different from ours today — the longing for peace, and the desire for economic security and vitality for all people.
» Full Story By Rev. Cathlin Baker

The wall calendar that hangs beside the kitchen telephone, or on the wall behind the home office desk, is a dutiful thing. First and foremost, it lays out the days of the month with the pleasant organization of a numbered grid, so that we might make plans, set goals and schedule the chaos of our lives to the best of our ability, however futile such endeavors may be. As days go by, calendars let us watch, one “X” at a time, the moments that make up our lives disappear into the ether, a reminder that though the days of the week and the months of the year are set on repeat, we continue our headlong plummet into the blinding uncertainty of the future. Time is fickle, mercurial; but as yesterday is already gone and tomorrow exists only west of Tonga, the calendar helps us to structure life’s volatile chronology into something we can read and agree upon.
» Full Story By Cooper Davis

Friday, December 18, 2009

For the past two Christmases, the Vineyard Playhouse in Vineyard Haven has mounted a delightful production of It’s a Wonderful Life, The Radio Play (written by Philip Grecian). Those Islanders who haven’t yet had a chance to see it are missing out on the full holiday experience.
» Full Story By Holly Nadler

Friday, December 11, 2009

Here’s a proposed expedition every bit as adventurous (but not nearly as brutal) as Capt. Shackleton’s trek across South Georgia Island: Why not sit down with loved ones and plan to attend every last event being staged over the coming weekend — Dec. 11 to Dec. 13 — of the Christmas In Edgartown extravaganza?
» Full Story By Holly Nadler

It was Thursday night at the Wharf in Edgartown, which means Stump Trivia Night, a competitive team trivia contest that runs weekly.
» Full Story By Peter Brannen

Friday, December 4, 2009

In their pale pink tights and soundless slippers, teeny ballerinas scurry across the vast stage just a little too quickly in this rehearsal; when the lights come up tomorrow and Sunday, the troupe will be hidden underneath the huge, stilt-supported skirt of Mother Ginger in the annual Island production of The Nutcracker.
» Full Story By Lauren Martin

Friday, November 27, 2009

This Saturday will mark the opening of the exhibit Those Who Serve - Martha’s Vineyard and World War II at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum on School street in Edgartown. There will be an opening ceremony at 3 p.m. at the Federated Church on South Summer street featuring several of the Vineyarders profiled in the exhibit, followed by a reception at the museum.
» Full Story By Peter Brannen

It’s a little after 7 a.m. on a Friday morning, and the ferry has just taken off from Vineyard Haven. A lively group of teens and preteens is seated around tables in one of the boat’s back corner rooms. The aisle is stacked high with backpacks, purses and lunchboxes, and the room is stifling hot from all the extra bodies. A few of the kids hold travel coffee mugs, but most are filled with water or hot chocolate — there is a surprising shortage of caffeine considering the energy the kids display, having been awake since 5:30.
» Full Story By Megan Dooley

Vineyard harbors have emptied. Mooring balls that bobbed up and down through the summer were replaced by floating blue and white stakes. The osprey are gone and herring gulls dominate the shoreline.
» Full Story By Mark Alan Lovewell

Friday, November 20, 2009

A trio of ten-year-olds crowded the ticket booth of the Vineyard Playhouse last week, earnestly peddling imaginary tickets to playhouse employee Geneva Monks. This was their dress rehearsal, preparation for last Saturday’s production of Cave Critters Unite, the play created by Bridget Mello’s class at the Edgartown School for their part in the playhouse’s Fourth Grade Theatre Project.
» Full Story By Megan Dooley

Friday, November 13, 2009

It is Wednesday night in Vineyard Haven and Evan Hall’s weekly hip-hop dance class is ready to begin.
» Full Story By Peter Brannen

The waters around the Vineyard are warming and scientists believe this may account for a shift in fish populations here. Scientists with the National Marine Fisheries Service and their science center in Woods Hole recently released the results of an 18-month study that examined 40 years of fisheries data and the movement of more than 30 species.
» Full Story By Mark Alan Lovewell

Friday, November 6, 2009

He is a seasoned pianist with an Island legacy that echoes through the streets of Oak Bluffs, where he spent a 20-year run entertaining guests at David’s Island House. She is a teenage singing prodigy who won the chance to perform with the Boston Pops, a homegrown celebrity just beginning to leave her footprint on the musical world.
» Full Story By Megan Dooley

Jill Robie, the new interim executive director at the YMCA of Martha’s Vineyard, began her first day on the job Tuesday wearing a hard hat and walking through the new $12 million facility in construction off the Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road.
» Full Story By Mark Alan Lovewell

Friday, October 30, 2009

Aquinnah charter captain William (Buddy) Vanderhoop Jr. has heard plenty of Vineyard ghost stories. Most he doesn’t believe — but he is not without a belief in the supernatural. “There are spirits less harmful,” he said, “that are not spooky as most people would like.”
» Full Story By Mark Alan Lovewell