For the Love of Gold

From Gazette editions of 1850:

From letters received in town from a member of the “Vineyard Mining Company,” who proceeded to California in the bark Sarah:

Forty seven years ago in August 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King made the I Have a Dream speech, a speech which I now know was heard all over the world. I have been learning about this speech since I can remember going to school. It was always meaningful, but I was never able to grasp the full effect of what he was saying because I’ve always gone to integrated schools with kids of all races and ethnicities. Though I felt that here on Martha’s Vineyard, I was treated fairly and that the Vineyard in many ways resembled Dr.

Nightclub Versus Liquor Store

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

MOVING ON

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

The election is now over. Thankfully, the ridiculous television commercials will no longer play on every channel twice an hour as they were these last few days. Phew. To both Democrats and Republicans, I say this:

Devil’s Den

From a 1933 Gazette edition:

Many Vineyarders and many Island visitors have heard the name the Devil’s Den. And there are many Islanders and others who have visited the place when it was intact. Yet so great are the changes wrought by the activities of man and nature in the space of a few decades that comparatively few people can find the spot today, and only a few know the history of this spot that bears such a fearsome name.

In the mid-1980s, after EduComp moved into its big brick building at the head of Main street, Vineyard Haven, I was a frequent visitor, either renting time on the store’s laser printers or buying office supplies. One big bonus, especially in summer, was the off-street parking in the sloping dirt lot behind the building. The tricky part was — and still is — the getting in and especially the getting out. You leave the parking lot, pass alongside the building, and then start creeping across the sidewalk toward the road.