In sharp contrast to previous Presidential visits, the public will be shut out when Barack Obama and his family arrive on the Vineyard somewhere in a five-hour window on Sunday afternoon.

As the Martha’s Vineyard Airport and later a White House spokeswoman confirmed yesterday, there will be no chance for the media, or, more importantly, Islanders to see the First Family.

“It will be what’s called a closed arrival,” said the airport manager Sean Flynn.

More than 20 years ago, as a young lawyer working in the New York district attorney’s office, Cyrus Vance Jr. prosecuted the case of a young, crack-addicted black woman, who had been involved in an armed robbery.

“During the course of about a year and a half, I became convinced, because of the good work of her lawyer and the judge, that what Pam really needed was not state prison, but treatment,” he recalled Wednesday in an interview on the porch of Alley’s Store in West Tisbury.

So that is what she got.

As Hurricane Bill threatened offshore and the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency issued a warning to swimmers and boaters about high seas and strong currents this weekend, the town of Chilmark is considering changes in beach safety protocol in light of two swimmer deaths and several dramatic rescues in the past month.

Hurricane Bill yesterday was traveling north-northwest from off the east coast of Central America, spreading high swells over the western Atlantic and is projected to pass some 200 miles off the coast of Massachusetts sometime on Sunday.