Commentary
When the West Tisbury Library opened in 1993, it was already too small. A frantic patchwork of low-cost space solutions over the years have never kept up with growing demand for library services. For well over a decade we have struggled with a severe shortage of space for patrons, materials, programs and staff. Today we have the Island’s largest collection and the highest circulation, but the smallest facility (except for Aquinnah).
The current Edgartown Library building was last expanded in 1975, when our population numbered about 1,500 people. Today our year-round population is a bit more than 4,000, straining the quality of library services for all its users — most of all, the children for whom a good public library can open whole worlds of new opportunities. In January, Edgartown submitted a grant application to the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners for a new, 15,585-square-foot library that would replace the old Union School next to our new elementary school.
I really had no idea what to expect as I approached the Chilmark Community Center a little after 7 p.m. on Saturday night, but I hoped it would be like days of old when — as teenagers — we would make the long trek from down-Island to square-dance or listen to folksingers like Jesse Benton or David Gude. I was not disappointed.
Each year 200,000 women and men are diagnosed with breast cancer in the United States alone. Erin Kokoszka has felt this statistic personally. “My maternal grandmother and all of her sisters have been affected by breast cancer,” she said. “My grandmother is a survivor and her other living sister is a survivor, but she’s lost two sisters. My two great-aunts have both been killed by the disease.”
Letter from the Publisher
One should not take the helm of a 165-year-old institution without a sense of history and humility, and so I arrived this week to take up my new post as publisher of the Vineyard Gazette with a healthy dose of both.
Farm Talk
From a Spring, 1948 Gazette: