Editorials
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.
Thanksgiving 2007
Shifting Sands
Scientific study is yielding valuable insights into coastal erosion. Researchers have discovered that permanent structures built in attempts to contain and control erosion — jetties, groins and seawalls — vary in effect between futility and making things worse.
Government and private individuals build these structures in good faith: sometimes to protect roads and houses, sometimes as a strategy to catch and retain sand drifting in the water down the shoreline.
Saturday at McCarthy Field: The Big Game
Whoever said it was only a game had it wrong. Like so many of the great football rivalries across the decades — Harvard and Yale, Army and Navy, Ohio State and Michigan — the rivalry between the Vineyard and Nantucket is buried deep in the psyche of the people who live on the two Islands. The slumbering beast awakens once a year with an infectious burst of energy and rah-rah. In this case that means the Saturday before Thanksgiving, and this year the Big Game will be played at home.
Harnessing Positive Energy