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Friday, February 3, 2012

When Nat and Pam Benjamin and their two-year-old daughter Jessica sailed into Vineyard Haven Harbor in 1972, Nat wondered aloud to his family, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a boatyard to fix up some of the wrecks around here and maybe build some new boats?”
» Full Story

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Boston funnymen and women, heralded as The Boston Gold Rush of Comedy, arrived on the scene shortly after New York comics showcased at famous clubs such as the Improv and Catch a Rising Star, and Los Angeles comics appeared at the West Coast Improv, the Comedy Club and the Laugh Factory.
» Full Story By Holly Nadler

Feature Stories from the Vineyard Gazette Archives

Friday, January 27, 2012

On Friday evenings during the winter, Pauline Speed and Loretta May phone each other to check on their dinner plans. “You feel like cooking tonight?” one friend will ask the other.
» Full Story By Sara Brown

Students in Elaine Weintraub’s Irish history class at the regional high school took their studies outside on Monday, trying their hand at one of the oldest sports in the world, the Gaelic game of hurling.
» Full Story By Ivy Ashe

Admit it, you’ re an American Idol fanatic.
» Full Story

Friday, January 20, 2012

As Dukes County ambassadors to Gov. Deval Patrick’s statewide youth council, Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School seniors Delmont Araujo and Emma Hallbilsback have had an inside look at politics and public service in the year since they were sworn in at the state house.
» Full Story Sara Brown

During its 16-year history, Aboveground Records has been a haven for finding all manner of music, new and old, popular and obscure.
» Full Story By Remy Tumin

Island artist Margot Datz and mermaids go hand-in-hand, or fin-in-fin, as it were.
» Full Story By Ivy Ashe

Friday, January 13, 2012

Asked in an interview about five years ago to name his favorite spot in Chilmark, my grandfather almost instantly responded: “The Keith Farm, Middle Road.”
» Full Story By Chris Fischer

This is what 118 people saw on Sunday afternoon’s otter walk sponsored by the Vineyard Conservation Society: three ducks, five dogs on leashes, a rusted tractor wheel, and four folding chairs with broken seats.
» Full Story Anna Thomas

Willy Mason on drums? I have never seen that before. The headliner of Vineyard musicians who fills houses across our nation and in Europe played back-up all night. But Willy was appropriately humble in this company — a gathering of the best of the best of Island musicians.
» Full Story By Sam Low

There are 71 of them and they come from all parts of the Island to help. They are the volunteers who help run the Island Food Pantry.
» Full Story By Mark Alan Lovewell

Friday, January 6, 2012

At dawn on the last Friday of the year there were just a few ripples in the waters off Owen Park in Vineyard Haven. The temperature hovered in the low 40s as the morning sun first peeked out from behind the treetops on the banks of the Lagoon. Just then six women rowing a thirty-two-foot Cornish pilot gig appeared from behind the harbor jetty.
» Full Story By Margaret Knight

Last month Scott McDowell worked late into the night to meet his Christmas orders. For those wandering the waterfront, along the Menemsha Basin Road, there was the familiar ringing of the Menemsha Bight buoy in the distance but much closer came the continuous sound of a tapping hammer.
» Full Story By Mark Alan Lovewell

When thinking about tattoos the old cliché of the tattoo dive in a port-of-call and the drunken sailor who staggers inside is never far away. The sailor wants an anchor emblazoned over his bicep on top of a heart with the inscription “Ruthie,” and he wants it now.
» Full Story By Holly Nadler

Friday, December 23, 2011

Low-fat is not part of the vocabulary at the Savory Pie Company. “I’ve had people ask me if I had any low-fat and I look at them like you’ve got to be kidding me,” owner Dee Smith said at her Tea Lane Catering kitchen in Chilmark this week. “There’s a need for gluten free and we’re just starting with that, but there’s certainly no word like low-fat in our category of pies.”
» Full Story By Remy Tumin

Kenny Ponte is a good-natured, soft-spoken man who developed diabetes when he was two years old. “It was a hard process,” he said of growing up with the illness. “It makes you different from the other kids in terms of what you can eat, the ways you can have reactions. As I got older, the diabetes started getting worse. When I found out about how my kidneys were being damaged, it was another thing to deal with.”
» Full Story By Julian Wise

Friday, December 9, 2011

There are places in America where it might be a challenge to find 50 people eager to immerse themselves in Civil War history and eminent scholars willing to lead them. The Vineyard is not such a place.
» Full Story Sara Brown

On Tuesday night there is a conversation at Offshore Ale in Oak Bluffs that rises above the workaday Amber-Ale-fired chatter about the big game or the latest political gaffe. Next to the bar, pianist Jeremy Berlin and guitarist Eric Johnson are carrying on what is undoubtedly the most interesting conversation of the night. Both are fluent in jazz.
» Full Story By Peter Brannen

Friday, December 2, 2011

An anchor of the Edgartown retail district for almost three decades, the eclectic store In the Woods will close its doors for good at the end of this month. One factor: the high rent.
» Full Story By Remy Tumin

Thursday, November 24, 2011

The list this year is for more than 300 children. Volunteers at the Red Stocking Fund have checked it twice and are already deep into shopping for shoes, warm winter coats and pajamas for needy Island children.
» Full Story By Mark Alan Lovewell

Open the doors to the Agricultural Hall on a Winter Farmers’ Market Saturday and the warm atmosphere immediately embraces you. A few steps in, familiar faces gather fireside on benches sharing stories and hearty food, while Kevin Keady and Don Groover provide the background music in the great room filled with local goods.
» Full Story By Alison Mead

At her Vineyard Haven art gallery, Louisa Gould hurriedly unwrapped a framed acrylic painting of cherries in a bowl by artist Maya Farber.
» Full Story Sara Brown

Friday, November 18, 2011

Strong characters with Russian accents, a story line set in an era unfamiliar to teenagers, an elaborate set design with complicated lighting cues and music that covers the waterfront — it’s no wonder the high school drama department started work on this play last spring.
» Full Story By Remy Tumin

During the first week of November one of Trip Barnes’s moving trucks pulled up to an empty store on Charles street in the Beacon Hill section of Boston. For years the space had been the home of a quaint children’s clothing store, but that had recently gone out of business. Now, from out of the truck came a flotsam of items, including numerous rusty bikes, old doors and assorted oars.
» Full Story By Bill Eville