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Friday, March 19, 2010

While Disney saturates the media with ads for its Tim Burton extravaganza Alice in Wonderland, young Island thespians are sending Alice tumbling through a television screen instead of a looking glass, in a play about the absurdity of media-saturated consumer culture, called Alice in Americaland.
» Full Story By Lauren Martin

Edith (Mello) Tobin, 90, of Newington, Conn., and the Vineyard, beloved widow of Charles L. Tobin died Saturday, March 13.
» Full Story

Joan MacKay Brown, 84, died March 9 at the Windemere Nursing Facility in Oak Bluffs. Born in Rochester, N.Y., she attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario and graduate school at the University of Toronto, Canada. She was director of occupational therapy at the Grenfell Medical Mission in Labrador. Later, she was employed as a medical secretary and case manager with the Central New York Inter-religious Council. She would have been 85 on March 15.
» Full Story

Charles (Chuck) Youngs of Orlando, Fla., and Oak Bluffs, died on March 3 at his home in Orlando. He was 79 years old. He was born in Providence, R.I., the son of Charles and Ruth Youngs.
» Full Story

Leonora Pauline Bettencourt, of Edgartown, died at the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital on Wednesday, March 10, at the age of 93. She was predeceased by her husband Edwin A. Bettencourt.
» Full Story

Feature Stories from the Vineyard Gazette Archives

Friday, March 12, 2010

In a decade or two, they may all be headlining the Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival. But for now, a group of 14 aspiring young Island filmmakers will at least enjoy the opportunity to share their work with the Vineyard community and possibly a few of the seasoned filmmakers who will attend the festival to promote their own work.
» Full Story By Megan Dooley

There were two competing lively scenes at Offshore Ale Company’s fifth annual brewery open tour on Saturday. While Good Night Louise carried patrons to the tipsy twilight hours with jam band standards, upstairs an even wilder party raged within the walls of the brewery’s fermentation tanks. Here yeast organisms were reproducing, by the hundreds of millions, gorging themselves on sugars and excreting carbon dioxide and alcohol. And though the brewery tour only lasted until the early evening this party will last for weeks.
» Full Story By Peter Brannen

Friday, March 5, 2010

The police officers’ prayer Chaplain David Berube offers his colleagues at the Oak Bluffs police department begins with the words: “Lord, I ask for courage . . . courage to take me where others will not go.”
» Full Story By Peter Brannen

Friday, February 26, 2010

Several black and pink piglets scamper in an old horse paddock at Katama Farm this cool February day. The piglets are destined for the dinner table, but unlike their factory-raised counterparts, these pigs are free to snuffle outside in the sun.
» Full Story By Rachel Orr

Friday, February 19, 2010

They meet in the deep of winter and talk about summer fishing. Though the temperature outside is in the 20s on this Monday night and icicles hang from the eaves, the room inside the Martha’s Vineyard Rod and Gun Club in Edgartown is infused with the warmth of a July day on the water with the sun beating down and the false albacore running off the Menemsha jetty. This is fly-tying night, and it has been going on every Monday night here since January.
» Full Story By Mark Alan Lovewell

Friday, February 12, 2010

As the lights went out and The Jackson 5’s ABC began playing, there was nothing left to do backstage, for adults and kids alike, but to get down with a final preshow dance, reveling in the excitement of closing night of the Fourth Grade Theatre Project performance of Calculated Risk.
» Full Story By Jonah Lipsky

On Monday, the U.S. Coast Guard shut down 24 of its American Loran-C transmitters around the country and afar. For many older commercial fishermen it marked the end of an era.
» Full Story By Mark Alan Lovewell

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

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