This is a significant year for me. It marks my 75th summer of coming to the Vineyard. When my widowed mother and my stepfather got married, I came to his Vineyard Haven summer home as a very young teenager in 1937. Having lucked into a good thing, I kept coming back. I did miss a few early summers. In 1940 and 1941, we lived on government service in the Philippines, too far away to get back to the Vineyard. And in the World War years of 1943-1945 I was in the Army, living on the less hospitable islands of New Guinea and New Britain. But I haven’t missed a Vineyard summer since.

Understandably, if not admirably, summer people tend to spend all their time with each other. But looking back over all these years, I realize how very much I have relied on, and how very much I have enjoyed, my year-round Islander friends. Here are three old favorites.

Roger Engley built our house. My wife Eleanor and I, both of us in second marriages had six children to handle — two of hers, two of mine, two of ours. For several summers we tried to get by on cheap Lambert’s Cove rentals, with a cheap rented tent on the lawn to absorb excess kids. Awful! Since my stepfather had offered us a chunk of his land on Middle Road, we decided to build our own house, but just as cheap as possible. Some forgotten saint recommended Roger Engley, a West Tisbury contractor rumored to be not only cheap but good.

We couldn’t afford an architect, so Eleanor and I and Roger designed the house ourselves, sitting in Roger’s living room. He was a pleasant, ordinary, average-looking man but full of ideas. We said from the start, tight budget. Roger solved the children problem by creating two double-decker bunk bed rooms, a boys’ dorm and girls’ dorm. Finished floors, wood or linoleum, were too expensive, but he said we could survive with ugly, splintery plywood sub flooring, covered by tatami mats, until we could afford real floors. We told him we didn’t need a basement, but Roger said that in financially better years to come, we would probably want to install a furnace, and it was far wiser to build a small basement now than to carve one out under a finished house. So we got a tiny basement — which today contains not only a small furnace but a bunch of swimming pool machinery.

Our biggest design contention was a fireplace. Roger admitted that a decent fireplace with a proper brick chimney would be expensive, well over our budget, so of course we said no. Roger thought about it. Then he said, “You have to have a fireplace. I can’t let you not have a fireplace. I’ll work it off somewhere else.” He was too expert to lose money on a project, but his highest motivation was client satisfaction rather than profit. So we got a fireplace and a handsome chimney made of used brick, and our house was finished in 1965, right on time and right on budget. Our family enjoyed many cheery fires over many years, always remembering Roger’s insistence. Client satisfaction.

Cherrystones, steamers, lobsters, dark chunks of tuna, great one-and-a-half-inch thick slabs of swordfish. Everett Poole supplied them all to Eleanor and me out of Poole’s Fish Market in Menemsha. And only Everett Poole. Very early in our Chilmark life we were warned by other Poole customers that we must never, never be seen going into Larsen’s Fish Market right next door, not even if Everett was temporarily out of some seafood we wanted. “If Everett hears about it — and he hears about everything — he’ll never serve you again.” We have no idea if this was true because we didn’t dare risk finding out.

Everett was brusque, sardonic, very funny whenever he chose to be. Standing behind his glass display counters, waiting on customers, he always wore a dark-visored fisherman’s cap, perhaps to remind everybody that he had once been a fisherman himself and knew everything about fish, perhaps just to conceal his baldness. He had a sharp temper, and there were other ways to make him angry without going to Larsen’s. Eleanor and I once phoned in an order for two lobsters that we would pick up in late afternoon for our dinner. Something came up — a friend’s invitation or something — so we didn’t pick up our order and didn’t think to phone and cancel. Everett had put our lobsters in a bag for us, and overnight they died.

Next morning he phoned us. He was furious. Eleanor was properly apologetic and said we would of course pay for them. When Everett refused, she begged to pay for them. Again Everett refused. He much preferred being furious, and he continued to give us verbal hell. Although he didn’t eject us as customers, he never forgot and never stopped reminding us of our mortal sin.

Everett served as the official moderator for Chilmark’s town meetings. Summer people can attend town meetings, but we can’t vote on anything and we can’t even address the meeting without the unanimous consent of the townspeople. Eleanor and I often attended the meetings, not because they were interesting or because we wanted to speak, but because we liked to watch Everett perform. No nonsense allowed from anybody. He was particularly good when a non-voter wanted to speak. After briskly explaining the unanimous consent rule, he would ask the meeting if there was any objection. If he thought well of the would-be speaker, his pause for consent was tiny before he said, “Go ahead.” But if he disapproved — and Everett disapproved of a lot of folks — his pause stretched out until somebody dutifully objected.

When Everett retired from fishmongering, we stayed with his store for a couple of years, but it wasn’t the same without him, so we switched to Larsen’s. Sorry, Everett.

Ted Farrow and his wife Jane ran Tashtego on Main Street in Edgartown, the best Island store in my 75 years. We bought everything there — Christmas presents, china, furniture, household objects of every kind — with quality as the reigning principle. The Farrows and Graveses became good friends, sharing dinners at each others’ homes. The Farrow home was preferred because they had a piano, and Ted could play from memory every popular song you ever heard of.

Trained as an architect, he designed the huge extension that doubled the size of our house. By the 1980s our original Roger Engley home felt too small and cramped. Besides, thanks to high-level jobs at Life and Time Warner, and thanks to having finished paying for all those kids’ education, we were flush. Lucky for us, because there was not a penurious bone in Ted’s tall athletic body, not a penny-saving thought in his handsome creative head. Here we go! A giant master bedroom, a giant new bathroom, a supersize two-level living room with a much grander brick chimney, painted white and fronted by a mammoth hearth consisting of gray stone slabs so heavy that it took four men to carry each one into place. Between this new palace and our old house Ted conceived a wide galleria lined by eight gaudy glass sidewall lamps. Quality everywhere, just like at Tashtego. No budget existed for all this, only Ted’s substantial initial estimate, never mentioned again or even thought of again, except by me. I could see how low his estimate was.

Eleanor had good reason not to worry about the expense. She had wanted to move to waterfront property, still affordable back then, but I refused to leave the house we had built. As stay-here bribery, I had given her a gorgeous swimming pool and now this grand extension. But I never dreamed it would be so extravagant.

One day when I was away from the house, Ted showed Eleanor his new idea for our bathroom floor, handmade green Italian tiles, costly but perfect. By the time I got home, they had settled on it. I thought I had every right to explode over this new extravagance, committed in my absence, so I did. When the dust had settled, Ted took me aside because he had something serious to tell me. He said he knew us both very very well. Eleanor was adventurous, daring, marvelous sense of taste, willing to try new things. He paused. “But you, Ralph, you like things the way they are.”

This is the best character analysis I’ve ever received. Later when I told Eleanor, she said, not for the first time, “Ted’s right. You are very stubborn.”

They are both right. No doubt they explain why I have been coming to the same Island for 75 years, with the same wife for 54 years, in the same house for 47 years. But I do think there is another element of explanation. It’s called love.

 

Ralph Graves is a former editor of Life Magazine and editorial director of Time Inc. He is a novelist and a longtime seasonal resident of Chilmark.