End to a Distinguished Public Career

It is fashionable these days to criticize the United States Congress and all those elected to serve the citizenry in every congressional district across this land. There is a rising populist protest in the country and the anger is directed not only at the institution of Congress but at just about every incumbent representative who today claims to do the people’s business from the distant back corridors of Capitol Hill.

The eye of the beholder, that’s where they say the beauty lies. Maybe this is why the conundrum of wind energy being wrangled within our Island newspapers and e-mail threads has no apparent clear answer.

Chappaquiddick’s Long and Winding Road

Is a bike path really needed on Chappy, the last rural outpost on the Vineyard? It’s hard to say and there are two distinct points of view on the subject, but this much can be said: the current debate raging over the issue has grown needlessly vituperative. People on both sides of the issue must put down their swords and stop the finger-pointing or risk irreparable harm in their community.

THE REAL MENEMSHA

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

Signs Matter

Character is in all the little features, those details that form the individual nature of a place. On the Vineyard, it’s in the split rail fences, shingles, dirt roads and old, working barns. And good for Edgartown for saying that it’s in signposts, too.

From Gazette editions of March, 1935:

While telephone wires were busy with inquiries as to whether all or only part of Edgartown was being consumed, many town residents watched the spectacle — a thin line of firefighters combatting a blaze which swept across the Great Plain between Edgartown Great Pond and Katama Bay, threatening every house in its path and destroying four small buildings and grove after grove of pine and oak. The origin of the fire was still unclear, and the selectmen commissioned Chief of Police James Geddis to make an investigation.