A celebration of life for Alice Cynthia Meisner was held recently at the Barn, Bowl and Bistro in Oak Bluffs. She died on Oct. 8, 2023 at the age of 79.

Alice Cynthia Meisner, known to all as Cindy, was born Sept. 16, 1944 in Schenectady, N.Y., to James Stuart MacMackin and Alice (Peters) MacMackin. She passed away in Plymouth after a brief illness.

A descendant of the White family, who emigrated to America aboard the Mayflower, she was raised in a Quaker household.

Her parents introduced her to Martha’s Vineyard at a very young age and initially she spent her summers in Oak Bluffs on East Chop. The family ties to the Island, and Oak Bluffs in particular, had begun several generations before with her great grandfather Hamilton Greene, the builder and proprietor of the Dunmere by the Sea cottage and owner of the Greene’s Block of upper Circuit avenue.

She grew up in Central (upstate) New York, where her father worked for General Electric, as a corporate attorney for the defense electronics division. She attended the Fayetteville-Manlius High School and went on to study at Middlebury College in Vermont, where she obtained a degree in European history. Upon graduating she married her college sweet-heart, Ivo Meisner. They spent several years working on the Island where she was employed at the Vineyard Gazette as a reporter, and later as a proofreader and librarian.

She left the Island for a short period of time and resided in Fairbanks, Alaska, after the birth of her first son, where her husband was stationed for the Army as part of the Judge Advocate General Corps. She would fondly recollect that, other than the Vineyard, Alaska was her favorite place to live.

She returned to Martha’s Vineyard in the early 1970s, where she gave birth to her second son and began to settle into ‘Island life’. She became involved in local politics and was a member of the Edgartown planning board and as an emergency medical technician for the Edgartown ambulance service. During her tenure on the planning board, she took on over-development in order to protect open land. Her strong position on preservation earned her the ire of several developers. One developer quipped he was going to name a street ‘Cindy’s Way’ due to her refusal to back down from her position in opposing his development plan.

She also fought against the installation of water pipes containing tetrachloroethylene in Edgartown, due to its toxicity and potential health concerns.

When she retired from Edgartown politics, she became the owner and proprietor of the Book Den East, in Oak Bluffs, where she sold used and rare books. As an avid reader, this was a dream career for her. She made many friends while conducting a brisk book trade. The store would be open in the spring, summer and into the fall, During the winter she would travel to book fairs and clearing houses to find interesting reading material for the next season.

She had a love of travel and visited many far-flung places around the globe. As a high school student, she was an exchange student in Germany. During her lifetime she also visited the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Switzerland, Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, lceland and Finland. In Finland, she cross-country skied across Lapland for nearly a month. She would often lament the lack of proper restroom facilities during her ski adventure, which she described as very cold and with lots of reindeer meat. She preferred her accommodations at the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, Vt., to the austere tundra of Finland.

Above all, she was a devoted and loving mother. She patiently shepherded her two sons around the globe during her travels. She would often joke that she raised them in a ‘free-range style’, allowing them both to wander Sweetened Water Farms and the bordering Beetle Swamp at will, requiring them back home only before it got dark.

Cindy retired from public life, remaining largely in Edgartown, in her home at Sweetened Water Farms, surrounded by her favorite books, a herd of cats,and various other wildlife. She enjoyed visits there from her cherished granddaughter.

She is survived by her son, Eerik Meisner, and his wife, Allison, of Oak Bluffs; her son Ian, and his wife, Yasuyo, of Plymouth, and her granddaughter, Katherine, of Plymouth.