Commentary
Hi, I am the editor for this week’s Sophomores Speak Out. Students have chosen to write about a variety of topics this week about events happening all over the world. We have written about international tragedies like Darfur and Richard McAuliffe has written a response to Eric Fletcher’s piece that appeared on Nov. 16 asking why should we help Darfur. School shootings in Germany, stun guns that kill and the aftermath of a cyclone that swept through Bangladesh are all covered as we considered the state of the world while giving thanks in our own lives.
If it weren’t for the war.
Fifty years ago this winter, in February, 1958, I began my journalistic career as editor of a fledgling monthly newspaper, the Springdale News. I had just turned eleven.
A key ingredient to increasing readership is a crackerjack staff. We engaged correspondents from New York, California and Scotland. And that’s where this story starts.
How does one find a pen pal from Scotland?
A Linotype Man to the End
Jonathan Sawyer, whose unexpected death Nov. 21 was reported in last Friday’s Gazette, was for twenty years a mainstay of this paper’s back shop printing staff.
Jon joined the Gazette staff part-time while he was still in school, following his frequent encounters on Pease’s Point Way with Elizabeth Bowie Hough, the paper’s late copublisher and editor with her husband the late Henry Beetle Hough. She would often give young Jon a ride, warning him that it was much too cold for walking.
Restoring Great Salt Pond
The draft Massachusetts Estuaries Project report on the Edgartown Great Pond obtained by the Gazette last week is required reading for all who live on the Vineyard. The conclusions of the report may be obvious, but no less startling on an Island with a long history of strictly protecting its pristine environment, and they extend well beyond the sandy perimeters of the Edgartown Great Pond: encroaching development and nitrogen escaping from septic systems are polluting Island ponds.
T wo weeks ago a group of Vineyard farmers , selectmen, county commissioners and other Islanders interested in farming heard about the advantages of setting up an agricultural commission from a delegation of representatives involved in agricultural commisions elsewhere in the commonwealth. Vineyarders attending this workshop felt that there was enough merit in the idea to put together a proposal for how this could be done on the Vineyard.
Rarely does the genteel card game of bridge merit both a news story on the front page of the arts section and an editorial in The New York Times, but that’s what happened recently during a raging controversy over free expression.