Opinion
Editor’s Note: The following story was published in the Gazette in August 1961 on the occasion of the fair centennial.
BY JOSEPH CHASE ALLEN
I have mixed feelings about going to the Agricultural Fair. This has nothing to do with the fair itself, which at 150-years-old has aged exceptionally well, maintaining its links to the past without a hint of mustiness. It is very much a thing of the present and this weekend I will bring my children to the fair many times.
Within a healthy system of food produc tion and distribution, farms would not need “saving.” However, as it is, we are losing farmland (and the corresponding skills,) at alarming rates. (In Massachusetts, about 20 per cent in the last 25 years.) The traditional system of inherited family farms is not sufficient.
For as long as I have been an active member of Amnesty International, and certainly from the mid-1980s, it has been taken as an article of faith that founder Peter Benenson was inspired to write his famous Forgotten Prisoners article in May 1961, that in turn led to the establishment of Amnesty, after reading a British newspaper article about two Portuguese students who had been arrested and imprisoned for raising their glasses in a toast to freedom.
Every year the Martha’s Vineyard Ecu menical Youth Group goes on a mission trip. Last year we went to Washington D.C. to help in a homeless shelter, the year before we worked in a soup kitchen in New York city. This year we were lucky enough to get to fly out to Nashville, Tenn. to help with flood recovery efforts.
Summer Swells
From Gazette editions of August, 1986:
In the middle of what will be his last long summer on the Vineyard for some time, Angelo Bartlett Giamatti enthusiastically compares ballet star Mikhail Barysnikov with the baseball Wizard of Oz, Ozzie Smith, who works his magic in the infield of the St. Louis Cardinals, one of 12 teams over which Mr. Giamatti will now preside as chief executive of the National League of professional baseball.