Soft Sell

From Gazette editions of July, 1986:

This week for the second time in less than a decade, Alley’s Store, a veteran West Tisbury institution, is changing hands. Howard and Susan Ulfelder of Hingham are buying the store from Charlie and Teena Parton, who bought it from the Alley family six years ago.

THE BEE BALM MURDERS: A Martha’s Vineyard Mystery. By Cynthia Riggs. Minotaur Books, 2011. 304 pages. $24.99 hardcover.

PROTECT HISTORIC DISTRICT

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

From a 1952 Gazette edition:

Since Thursday, when the Coast Guard building, three stories high, came towing into Menemsha Creek on a scow after crossing Vineyard Sound from Cuttyhunk . . . people have exclaimed: “How unusual!”

But here on the Vineyard the moving of buildings by water is an old story. Not too many men are now living who have engaged in such undertakings, but there are many familiar with the history of similar movings who can point out houses and other structures that floated alongshore to their present destinations.

It has long been evident that we need a new national anthem. The Star-Spangled Banner is tough to memorize and tougher to sing, and it celebrates a war we didn’t even win!

My candidate for a quintessentially American song, one that acknowledges pain as well as pride in our history, is City of New Orleans. Composed by the late Steve Goodman, who also wrote A Dying Cubs Fan’s Last Request, this bittersweet folk song grew out of a train ride from Chicago to New Orleans that Goodman and his wife took to visit his wife’s family.