Clamming Comes Back

The Island is full of talented fishermen, but even those hopeless with a hook can enjoy clamming. Clams are captives, lying lazily in wait for their captor. Successful quahauging takes only a rake.

Thank you, islanders

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

From a 1935 Gazette edition:

Of all peculiarly earth-born traditions that still survive among men, perhaps there is none older than that of the sea serpent in its varied forms. Research reveals that there were indeed fearsome things abounding in the sea at some ancient date. That tales of these creatures should have descended among mankind for generations is not at all strange.

Winner’s Circle

I’m trying to rhyme the word “Vineyard;”

Thank goodness it isn’t a sin word.

Unlike that Nantucket

Where oaths fill a bucket,

We keep our frustrations all inward.

— Eileen Maley

•

A man with no key to Quansoo

His paltry investments did rue

With portfolio tanked

That bright shining bank

Could only be reached by canoe.

— Beth Parker

•

What’s in a Name?

Notables

National newspapers last week carried the obituaries of three notable civil servants: conservationist and former U.S. Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall; Liz Carpenter, press secretary to Lady Bird Johnson during her White House years, and former Massachusetts State Senator and former Bristol (now Cape and Islands) district attorney Edmund Dinis. All three will be remembered here for their Island connections.